After major demonstrations in Algiers and several other cities in favor of independence (1960)[23][24] and a United Nations resolution recognizing the right to independence,[25]De Gaulle decided to open a series of negotiations with the FLN. These concluded with the signing of the Évian Accords in March 1962. A referendum took place on 8 April 1962 and the French electorate approved the Évian Accords, the final result was 91% in favor of the ratification of this agreement[26] and on 1 July, the Accords were subject to a second referendum in Algeria, where 99.72% voted for independence and just 0.28% against.[27]

The planned French withdrawal led to a state crisis, this included various assassination attempts on de Gaulle as well as some attempts at military coups. Most of the former were carried out by the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), an underground organization formed mainly from French military personnel supporting a French Algeria, which committed a large number of bombings and murders both in Algeria and in the homeland to stop the planned independence.

Upon independence in 1962, 900,000 European-Algerians (Pieds-noirs) fled to France within a few months in fear of the FLN's revenge. The French government was totally unprepared for the vast number of refugees, which caused turmoil in France, the majority of Algerian Muslims who had worked for the French were disarmed and left behind as the treaty between French and Algerian authorities declared that no actions could be taken against them.[28] However, the Harkis in particular, having served as auxiliaries with the French army, were regarded as traitors by the FLN and between 50,000 and 150,000 Harkis and family members were murdered by the FLN or by lynch-mobs, often after being abducted and tortured[dubious– discuss]. About 91,000 managed to flee to France[citation needed], some with help from their French officers acting against orders, and as of 2016[update] they and their descendants form a significant part of the Algerian-French population.

Background: French Algeria

Conquest of Algeria

On the pretext of a slight to their consul, the French invaded Algeria in 1830.[29] Directed by Marshall Bugeaud, who became the first Governor-General of Algeria, the conquest was violent, marked by a "scorched earth" policy designed to reduce the power of the native rulers Dey; this included massacres, mass rapes, and other atrocities.[30][31] Between 500,000 and 1,000,000, from approximately 3 million Algerians, were killed within the first three decades of the conquest.[32][33] French losses from 1830–51 were 3,336 killed in action and 92,329 dead in the hospital.[34]

In 1834, Algeria became a French military colony and was subsequently declared by the constitution of 1848 to be an integral part of France and divided into three departments (Alger, Oran and Constantine). Many French and other Europeans (Spanish, Italians, Maltese, and others) later settled in Algeria.

Under the Second Empire (1852–1871), the Code de l'indigénat (Indigenous Code) was implemented by the Sénatus-consulte of July 14, 1865. It allowed Muslims to apply for full French citizenship, a measure that few took, since it involved renouncing the right to be governed by sharia law in personal matters and was considered a kind of apostasy, its first article stipulated:

The indigenous Muslim is French; however, he will continue to be subjected to Muslim law. He may be admitted to serve in the army (armée de terre) and the navy (armée de mer), he may be called to functions and civil employment in Algeria. He may, on his demand, be admitted to enjoy the rights of a French citizen; in this case, he is subjected to the political and civil laws of France.[35]

However, prior to 1870, fewer than 200 demands were registered by Muslims and 152 by Jewish Algerians,[36] the 1865 decree was then modified by the 1870 Crémieux decrees, which granted French nationality to Jews living in one of the three Algerian departments. In 1881, the Code de l'Indigénat made the discrimination official by creating specific penalties for indigènes and organizing the seizure or appropriation of their lands.[36]

After World War II, equality of rights was proclaimed by the Ordonnance of March 7, 1944, and later confirmed by the Loi Lamine Guèye of May 7, 1946, which granted French citizenship to all the subjects of France's territories and overseas departments, and by the 1946 Constitution, the Law of September 20, 1947, granted French citizenship to all Algerian subjects, who were not required to renounce their Muslim personal status.[37][dubious– discuss]

Algeria was unique to France because, unlike all other overseas possessions acquired by France during the 19th century, only Algeria was considered and legally classified an integral part of France.

Algerian nationalism

Both Muslim and European Algerians took part in World War I, fighting for France. Algerian Muslims served as tirailleurs (such regiments were created as early as 1842[38]) and spahis; and French settlers as Zouaves or Chasseurs d'Afrique. With Wilson's 1918 proclamation of the Fourteen Points, the fifth reading: "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined", some Algerian intellectuals—dubbed oulémas—began to nurture the desire for independence or, at least, autonomy and self-rule.[citation needed]

The North African Star broke from the PCF in 1928, before being dissolved in 1929 at Paris's demand. Amid growing discontent from the Algerian population, the Third Republic (1871–1940) acknowledged some demands, and the Popular Front initiated the Blum-Viollette proposal in 1936 which was supposed to enlighten the Indigenous Code by giving French citizenship to a small number of Muslims. The pieds-noirs (Algerians of European origin) violently demonstrated against it and the North African Party opposed it, leading to the project's abandonment, the pro-independence party was dissolved in 1937, and its leaders were charged with the illegal reconstitution of a dissolved league, leading to Messali Hadj's 1937 founding of the Parti du peuple algérien (Algerian People's Party, PPA), which, at this time, no longer espoused full independence but only extensive autonomy. This new party was dissolved in 1939. Under Vichy, the French state attempted to abrogate the Crémieux decree in order to suppress the Jews' French citizenship, but the measure was never implemented.[citation needed]

On the other hand, nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas founded the Algerian Popular Union (Union populaire algérienne) in 1938. In 1943 Abbas wrote the Algerian People's Manifesto (Manifeste du peuple algérien). Arrested after the Sétif massacre of May 8, 1945, during which the French Army and pieds-noirs mobs killed about 6,000 Algerians,[40] Abbas founded the Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA) in 1946 and was elected as a deputy. Founded in 1954, the National Liberation Front (FLN) succeeded Messali Hadj's Algerian People's Party (PPA), while its leaders created an armed wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Army) to engage in an armed struggle against French authority. France, which had just lost Indochina, was determined not to lose the next anti-colonial war, particularly not in its oldest and nearest major colony, which was regarded as an integral part of the republic.[citation needed]

War chronology

Beginning of hostilities

French forces killed Algerian rebels, December 1954

In the early morning hours of November 1, 1954, FLN maquisards (guerrillas) attacked military and civilian targets throughout Algeria in what became known as the Toussaint Rouge (Red All-Saints' Day). From Cairo, the FLN broadcast a proclamation calling on Muslims in Algeria to join in a national struggle for the "restoration of the Algerian state – sovereign, democratic and social – within the framework of the principles of Islam." It was the reaction of Premier Pierre Mendès France (Radical-Socialist Party), who only a few months before had completed the liquidation of France's tete empire in Indochina, which set the tone of French policy for five years. He declared in the National Assembly, "One does not compromise when it comes to defending the internal peace of the nation, the unity and integrity of the Republic, the Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French. ... Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession." At first, and despite the Sétif massacre of May 8, 1945, and the pro-Independence struggle before World War II, most Algerians were in favor of a relative status-quo. While Messali Hadj had radicalized by forming the FLN, Ferhat Abbas maintained a more moderate, electoral strategy. Fewer than 500 fellaghas (pro-Independence fighters) could be counted at the beginning of the conflict,[41] the Algerian population radicalized itself in particular because of the terrorist acts of French-sponsored Main Rouge (Red Hand) group, which targeted anti-colonialists in all of the Maghreb region (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria), killing, for example, Tunisian activist Farhat Hached in 1952.[41]

ALN R.A. propaganda poster in Algiers, "The Algerian Revolution, a people at war against colonialist barbarity." (June 29, 1962, Rocher Noir)

The FLN uprising presented nationalist groups with the question of whether to adopt armed revolt as the main course of action, during the first year of the war, Ferhat Abbas's Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto (UDMA), the ulema, and the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) maintained a friendly neutrality toward the FLN. The communists, who had made no move to cooperate in the uprising at the start, later tried to infiltrate the FLN, but FLN leaders publicly repudiated the support of the party; in April 1956, Abbas flew to Cairo, where he formally joined the FLN. This action brought in many évolués who had supported the UDMA in the past, the AUMA also threw the full weight of its prestige behind the FLN. Bendjelloul and the pro-integrationist moderates had already abandoned their efforts to mediate between the French and the rebels.

After the collapse of the MTLD, the veteran nationalist Messali Hadj formed the leftistMouvement National Algérien (MNA), which advocated a policy of violent revolution and total independence similar to that of the FLN, but aimed to compete with that organisation. The Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), the military wing of the FLN, subsequently wiped out the MNA guerrilla operation in Algeria, and Messali Hadj's movement lost what little influence it had had there. However, the MNA retained the support of many Algerian workers in France through the Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Algériens (the Union of Algerian Workers). The FLN also established a strong organization in France to oppose the MNA, the "Café wars", resulting in nearly 5,000 deaths, were waged in France between the two rebel groups throughout the years of the War of Independence.

On the political front, the FLN worked to persuade—and to coerce—the Algerian masses to support the aims of the independence movement through contributions. FLN-influenced labor unions, professional associations, and students' and women's organizations were created to lead opinion in diverse segments of the population, but here too, violent coercion was widely used. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who became the FLN's leading political theorist, provided a sophisticated intellectual justification for the use of violence in achieving national liberation.[42] From Cairo, Ahmed Ben Bella ordered the liquidation of potential interlocuteurs valables, those independent representatives of the Muslim community acceptable to the French through whom a compromise or reforms within the system might be achieved.

As the FLN campaign of influence spread through the countryside, many European farmers in the interior (called Pieds-Noirs), many of whom lived on lands taken from Muslim communities during the nineteenth century,[43] sold their holdings and sought refuge in Algiers and other Algerian cities. After a series of bloody, random massacres and bombings by Muslim Algerians in several towns and cities, the French Pieds-Noirs and urban French population began to demand that the French government engage in sterner countermeasures, including the proclamation of a state of emergency, capital punishment for political crimes, denunciation of all separatists, and most ominously, a call for 'tit-for-tat' reprisal operations by police, military, and para-military forces. Colon vigilante units, whose unauthorized activities were conducted with the passive cooperation of police authorities, carried out ratonnades (literally, rat-hunts, raton being a racist term for denigrating Muslim Algerians) against suspected FLN members of the Muslim community.

By 1955, effective political action groups within the Algerian colonial community succeeded in convincing many of the governors general sent by Paris that the military was not the way to resolve the conflict. A major success was the conversion of Jacques Soustelle, who went to Algeria as governor general in January 1955 determined to restore peace. Soustelle, a one-time leftist and by 1955 an ardent Gaullist, began an ambitious reform program (the Soustelle Plan) aimed at improving economic conditions among the Muslim population.

ALN guerrillas using a mortar across the Algerian-Tunisian border protected by the electrified Morice Line. (1958)

The FLN adopted tactics similar to those of nationalist groups in Asia, and the French did not realize the seriousness of the challenge they faced until 1955, when the FLN moved into urbanized areas. "An important watershed in the War of Independence was the massacre of Pieds-Noirs civilians by the FLN near the town of Philippeville (now known as Skikda) in August, 1955. Before this operation, FLN policy was to attack only military and government-related targets, the commander of the Constantinewilaya/region, however, decided a drastic escalation was needed. The killing by the FLN and its supporters of 123 people, including 71 French,[44] including old women and babies, shocked Jacques Soustelle into calling for more repressive measures against the rebels, the French authorities stated that 1,273 guerrillas died in what Soustelle admitted were "severe" reprisals. The FLN subsequently claimed that 12,000 Muslims were killed.[45] Soustelle's repression was an early cause of the Algerian population's rallying to the FLN,[44] after Philippeville, Soustelle declared sterner measures and an all-out war began. In 1956, demonstrations by French Algerians caused the French government to not make reforms.

Soustelle's successor, Governor General Lacoste, a socialist, abolished the Algerian Assembly. Lacoste saw the assembly, which was dominated by pieds-noirs, as hindering the work of his administration, and he undertook the rule of Algeria by decree, he favored stepping up French military operations and granted the army exceptional police powers—a concession of dubious legality under French law—to deal with the mounting political violence. At the same time, Lacoste proposed a new administrative structure to give Algeria some autonomy and a decentralized government. Whilst remaining an integral part of France, Algeria was to be divided into five districts, each of which would have a territorial assembly elected from a single slate of candidates, until 1958, deputies representing Algerian districts were able to delay the passage of the measure by the National Assembly of France.

In August and September 1956, the leadership of the FLN guerrillas operating within Algeria (popularly known as "internals") met to organize a formal policy-making body to synchronize the movement's political and military activities, the highest authority of the FLN was vested in the thirty-four member National Council of the Algerian Revolution (Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne, CNRA), within which the five-man Committee of Coordination and Enforcement (Comité de Coordination et d'Exécution, CCE) formed the executive. The leadership of the regular FLN forces based in Tunisia and Morocco ("externals"), including Ben Bella, knew the conference was taking place but by chance or design on the part of the "internals" were unable to attend.

France opposed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's material and political assistance to the FLN, which some French analysts believed was the revolution's main sustenance, this attitude was a factor in persuading France to participate in the November 1956 British attempt to seize the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis.

During 1957, support for the FLN weakened as the breach between the internals and externals widened. To halt the drift, the FLN expanded its executive committee to include Abbas, as well as imprisoned political leaders such as Ben Bella, it also convinced communist and Arab members of the United Nations (UN) to put diplomatic pressure on the French government to negotiate a cease-fire. In 1957, it become common knowledge in France that French Army was routinely using torture to extract information from suspected FLN members.[46]Hubert Beuve-Méry, the editor of Le Monde declared in an edition on 13 March 1957: "From now on, Frenchman must know that they don't have the right to condemn in the same terms as ten years ago the destruction of Oradour and the torture by the Gestapo."[46] Another case that attracted much media attention was the murder of Maurice Audin, a Communist math professor at the University of Algiers and a suspected FLN member who the French Army arrested in June 1957.[47] Audin was tortured and killed and his body was never found,[46] as Audin was French rather than Algerian, his "disappearance" while in the custody of the French Army led to the case becoming a cause célèbre as his widow aided by the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet determinedly used sought to have the men responsible for her husband's death prosecuted.[46]

Existentialist writer, philosopher and playwright Albert Camus, native of Algiers, tried unsuccessfully to persuade both sides to at least leave civilians alone, writing editorials against the use of torture in Combat newspaper. The FLN considered him a fool, and some Pieds-Noirs considered him a traitor. Nevertheless, in his speech when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus said that when faced with a radical choice he would eventually support his community, this statement made him lose his status among left-wing intellectuals; when he died in 1960 in a car crash, the official thesis of an ordinary accident (a quick open-and-shut case) left more than a few observers doubtful. His widow claimed that Camus, though discreet, was in fact an ardent supporter of French Algeria in the last years of his life.[citation needed]

Battle of Algiers

To increase international and domestic French attention to their struggle, the FLN decided to bring the conflict to the cities and to call a nationwide general strike and also to plant bombs in public places, the most notable instance was the Battle of Algiers, which began on September 30, 1956, when three women, including Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif, simultaneously placed bombs at three sites including the downtown office of Air France. The FLN carried out shootings and bombings in the spring of 1957, resulting in civilian casualties and a crushing response from the authorities.

General Jacques Massu was instructed to use whatever methods deemed necessary to restore order in the city and to find and eliminate terrorists. Using paratroopers, he broke the strike and, in the succeeding months, destroyed the FLN infrastructure in Algiers, but the FLN had succeeded in showing its ability to strike at the heart of French Algeria and to assemble a mass response to its demands among urban Muslims. The publicity given to the brutal methods used by the army to win the Battle of Algiers, including the use of torture, strong movement control and curfew called quadrillage and where all authority was under the military, created doubt in France about its role in Algeria. What was originally "pacification" or a "public order operation" had turned into a colonial war accompanied by torture.

Guerrilla war

During 1956 and 1957, the FLN successfully applied hit-and-run tactics in accordance with guerrilla warfare theory. Whilst some of this was aimed at military targets, a significant amount was invested in a terror campaign against those in any way deemed to support or encourage French authority, this resulted in acts of sadistic torture and brutal violence against all, including women and children. Specializing in ambushes and night raids and avoiding direct contact with superior French firepower, the internal forces targeted army patrols, military encampments, police posts, and colonial farms, mines, and factories, as well as transportation and communications facilities. Once an engagement was broken off, the guerrillas merged with the population in the countryside, in accordance with Mao's theories. Kidnapping was commonplace, as were the ritual murder and mutilation of civilians[48][dubious– discuss] (see Torture section).

Although successfully provoking fear and uncertainty within both communities in Algeria, the revolutionaries' coercive tactics suggested that they had not yet inspired the bulk of the Muslim people to revolt against French colonial rule. Gradually, however, the FLN gained control in certain sectors of the Aurès, the Kabylie, and other mountainous areas around Constantine and south of Algiers and Oran; in these places, the FLN established a simple but effective—although frequently temporary—military administration that was able to collect taxes and food and to recruit manpower. But it was never able to hold large, fixed positions.

Muslim civilians killed by the FLN, 22 March 1956

The loss of competent field commanders both on the battlefield and through defections and political purges created difficulties for the FLN. Moreover, power struggles in the early years of the war split leadership in the wilayat, particularly in the Aurès, some officers created their own fiefdoms, using units under their command to settle old scores and engage in private wars against military rivals within the FLN.

French counter-insurgency operations

Despite complaints from the military command in Algiers, the French government was reluctant for many months to admit that the Algerian situation was out of control and that what was viewed officially as a pacification operation had developed into a war. By 1956, there were more than 400,000 French troops in Algeria, although the elite colonial infantry airborne units and the Foreign Legion bore the brunt of offensive counterinsurgency combat operations, approximately 170,000 Muslim Algerians also served in the regular French army, most of them volunteers. France also sent air force and naval units to the Algerian theater, including helicopters; in addition to service as a flying ambulance and cargo carrier, French forces utilized the helicopter for the first time in a ground attack role in order to pursue and destroy fleeing FLN guerrilla units. The American military later used the same helicopter combat methods in the Vietnam War, the French also used napalm,[49] which was depicted for the first time in the 2007 film L'Ennemi intime (Intimate Enemies) by Florent Emilio Siri.[49]

The French army resumed an important role in local Algerian administration through the Special Administration Section (Section Administrative Spécialisée, SAS), created in 1955. The SAS's mission was to establish contact with the Muslim population and weaken nationalist influence in the rural areas by asserting the "French presence" there. SAS officers—called képis bleus (blue caps)—also recruited and trained bands of loyal Muslim irregulars, known as harkis. Armed with shotguns and using guerrilla tactics similar to those of the FLN, the harkis, who eventually numbered about 180,000 volunteers, more than the FLN activists,[50] were an ideal instrument of counterinsurgency warfare.

French soldiers with suspected Algerian rebels

Harkis were mostly used in conventional formations, either in all-Algerian units commanded by French officers or in mixed units. Other uses included platoon or smaller size units, attached to French battalions, in a similar way as the Kit Carson Scouts by the U.S. in Vietnam. A third use was an intelligence gathering role, with some reported minor pseudo-operations in support of their intelligence collection.[51] U.S. military expert Lawrence E. Cline stated, "The extent of these pseudo-operations appears to have been very limited both in time and scope. ... The most widespread use of pseudo type operations was during the 'Battle of Algiers' in 1957, the principal French employer of covert agents in Algiers was the Fifth Bureau, the psychological warfare branch. "The Fifth Bureau" made extensive use of 'turned' FLN members, one such network being run by Captain Paul-Alain Leger of the 10th Paras. "Persuaded" to work for the French forces included by the use of torture and threats against their family; these agents "mingled with FLN cadres. They planted incriminating forged documents, spread false rumors of treachery and fomented distrust. ... As a frenzy of throat-cutting and disemboweling broke out among confused and suspicious FLN cadres, nationalist slaughtered nationalist from April to September 1957 and did France's work for her."[52] But this type of operation involved individual operatives rather than organized covert units.

French paratroopers in Algiers, 1957

One organized pseudo-guerrilla unit, however, was created in December 1956 by the French DST domestic intelligence agency, the Organization of the French Algerian Resistance (ORAF), a group of counter-terrorists had as its mission to carry out false flag terrorist attacks with the aim of quashing any hopes of political compromise.[53]

But it seemed that, as in Indochina, "the French focused on developing native guerrilla groups that would fight against the FLN", one of whom fought in the Southern Atlas Mountains, equipped by the French Army.[54]

French soldiers in Algeria, 1958

The FLN also used pseudo-guerrilla strategies against the French Army on one occasion, with Force K, a group of 1,000 Algerians who volunteered to serve in Force K as guerrillas for the French, but most of these members were either already FLN members or were turned by the FLN once enlisted. Corpses of purported FLN members displayed by the unit were in fact those of dissidents and members of other Algerian groups killed by the FLN, the French Army finally discovered the war ruse and tried to hunt down Force K members. However, some 600 managed to escape and join the FLN with weapons and equipment.[55]

Late in 1957, General Raoul Salan, commanding the French Army in Algeria, instituted a system of quadrillage (surveillance using a grid pattern), dividing the country into sectors, each permanently garrisoned by troops responsible for suppressing rebel operations in their assigned territory. Salan's methods sharply reduced the instances of FLN terrorism but tied down a large number of troops in static defense. Salan also constructed a heavily patrolled system of barriers to limit infiltration from Tunisia and Morocco, the best known of these was the Morice Line (named for the French defense minister, André Morice), which consisted of an electrified fence, barbed wire, and mines over a 320-kilometer stretch of the Tunisian border.

Electrified barriers along the entire length of Algeria's eastern and western borders

The French military command ruthlessly applied the principle of collective responsibility to villages suspected of sheltering, supplying, or in any way cooperating with the guerrillas. Villages that could not be reached by mobile units were subject to aerial bombardment. FLN guerrillas that fled to caves or other remote hiding places were tracked and hunted down; in one episode, FLN guerrillas, who refused to surrender and withdraw from a cave complex, were dealt with by French Foreign Legion Pioneer troops, who, lacking flamethrowers or explosives, simply bricked up each cave, leaving the residents to die of suffocation.[56]

Finding it impossible to control all of Algeria's remote farms and villages, the French government also initiated a program of concentrating large segments of the rural population, including whole villages, in camps under military supervision to prevent them from aiding the rebels; in the three years (1957–60) during which the regroupement program was followed, more than 2 million Algerians[18] were removed from their villages, mostly in the mountainous areas, and resettled in the plains, where it was difficult to reestablish their previous economic and social systems. Living conditions in the fortified villages were poor; in hundreds of villages, orchards and croplands not already burned by French troops went to seed for lack of care. These population transfers effectively denied the use of remote villages to FLN guerrillas, who had used them as a source of rations and manpower, but also caused significant resentment on the part of the displaced villagers. Relocation's social and economic disruption continued to be felt a generation later.

The French Army shifted its tactics at the end of 1958 from dependence on quadrillage to the use of mobile forces deployed on massive search-and-destroy missions against FLN strongholds; in 1959, Salan's successor, General Maurice Challe, appeared to have suppressed major rebel resistance. But political developments had already overtaken the French Army's successes.

Fall of the Fourth Republic

Recurrent cabinet crises focused attention on the inherent instability of the Fourth Republic and increased the misgivings of the army and of the pieds-noirs that the security of Algeria was being undermined by party politics. Army commanders chafed at what they took to be inadequate and incompetent political initiatives by the government in support of military efforts to end the rebellion, the feeling was widespread that another debacle like that of Indochina in 1954 was in the offing and that the government would order another precipitate pullout and sacrifice French honor to political expediency. Many saw in de Gaulle, who had not held office since 1946, the only public figure capable of rallying the nation and giving direction to the French government.

After his time as governor general, Soustelle returned to France to organize support for de Gaulle's return to power, while retaining close ties to the army and the pieds-noirs. By early 1958, he had organized a coup d'état, bringing together dissident army officers and pieds-noirs with sympathetic Gaullists. An army junta under General Massu seized power in Algiers on the night of May 13, thereafter known as the May 1958 crisis. General Salan assumed leadership of a Committee of Public Safety formed to replace the civil authority and pressed the junta's demands that de Gaulle be named by French president René Coty to head a government of national unity invested with extraordinary powers to prevent the "abandonment of Algeria."

On May 24, French paratroopers from the Algerian corps landed on Corsica, taking the French island in a bloodless action, Opération Corse. Subsequently, preparations were made in Algeria for Operation Resurrection, which had as its objectives the seizure of Paris and the removal of the French government. Resurrection was to be implemented in the event of one of three following scenarios: Were de Gaulle not approved as leader of France by the parliament; were de Gaulle to ask for military assistance to take power; or if it seemed that communist forces were making any move to take power in France. De Gaulle was approved by the French parliament on May 29, by 329 votes against 224, 15 hours before the projected launch of Operation Resurrection, this indicated that the Fourth Republic by 1958 no longer had any support from the French Army in Algeria and was at its mercy even in civilian political matters. This decisive shift in the balance of power in civil-military relations in France in 1958, and the threat of force was the main, immediate factor in the return of de Gaulle to power in France.

De Gaulle

Many people, regardless of citizenship, greeted de Gaulle's return to power as the breakthrough needed to end the hostilities, on his June 4 trip to Algeria, de Gaulle calculatedly made an ambiguous and broad emotional appeal to all the inhabitants, declaring, "Je vous ai compris" ("I have understood you."). De Gaulle raised the hopes of the pied-noir and the professional military, disaffected by the indecisiveness of previous governments, with his exclamation of "Vive l'Algérie française" ("Long live French Algeria") to cheering crowds in Mostaganem, at the same time, he proposed economic, social, and political reforms to improve the situation of the Muslims. Nonetheless, de Gaulle later admitted to having harbored deep pessimism about the outcome of the Algerian situation even then. Meanwhile, he looked for a "third force" among the population of Algeria, uncontaminated by the FLN or the "ultras" (colon extremists) through whom a solution might be found.

De Gaulle immediately appointed a committee to draft a new constitution for France's Fifth Republic, which would be declared early the next year, with which Algeria would be associated but of which it would not form an integral part. All Muslims, including women, were registered for the first time on electoral rolls to participate in a referendum to be held on the new constitution in September 1958.

De Gaulle's initiative threatened the FLN with decreased support among Muslims; in reaction, the FLN set up the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne, GPRA), a government-in-exile headed by Abbas and based in Tunis. Before the referendum, Abbas lobbied for international support for the GPRA, which was quickly recognized by Morocco, Tunisia, China, and several other African, Arab, and Asian countries, but not by the Soviet Union.

In February 1959, de Gaulle was elected president of the new Fifth Republic, he visited Constantine in October to announce a program to end the war and create an Algeria closely linked to France. De Gaulle's call on the rebel leaders to end hostilities and to participate in elections was met with adamant refusal. "The problem of a cease-fire in Algeria is not simply a military problem", said the GPRA's Abbas. "It is essentially political, and negotiation must cover the whole question of Algeria." Secret discussions that had been underway were broken off.

"We are not making war for ourselves, not making a colonialist war, Bigeard wears no shirt (he shows his opened uniform) as do my officers. We are fighting right here right now for them, for the evolution, to see the evolution of these people and this war is for them. We are defending their freedom as we are, in my opinion, defending the West's freedom. We are here ambassadors, Crusaders, who are hanging on in order to still be able to talk and to be able to speak for." Col. Bigeard (July 1959)

During this period in France, however, opposition to the conflict was growing among the population, notably the French Communist Party, then one of the country's strongest political forces, which was supporting the Algerian Revolution. Thousands of relatives of conscripts and reserve soldiers suffered loss and pain; revelations of torture and the indiscriminate brutality the army visited on the Muslim population prompted widespread revulsion, and a significant constituency supported the principle of national liberation. By 1959, it was clear that the status quo was untenable and France could either grant Algeria independence or allow real equality with the Muslims. De Gaulle told an advisor: "If we integrate them, if all the Arabs and the Berbers of Algeria were considered French, how could they be prevented from settling in France, where the living standard is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées".[57] International pressure was also building on France to grant Algeria independence, since 1955, the UN General Assembly annually considered the Algerian question, and the FLN position was gaining support. France's seeming intransigence in settling a colonial war that tied down half the manpower of its armed forces was also a source of concern to its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. In a September 16, 1959, statement, de Gaulle dramatically reversed his stand and uttered the words "self-determination" as the third and preferred solution [6], which he envisioned as leading to majority rule in an Algeria formally associated with France; in Tunis, Abbas acknowledged that de Gaulle's statement might be accepted as a basis for settlement, but the French government refused to recognize the GPRA as the representative of Algeria's Muslim community.

Week of barricades

Barricades in Algiers. "Long live Massu" (Vive Massu) is written on the banner, January 1960.

Convinced that de Gaulle had betrayed them, some units of European volunteers (Unités Territoriales) in Algiers led by student leaders Pierre Lagaillarde and Jean-Jacques Susini, café owner Joseph Ortiz, and lawyer Jean-Baptiste Biaggi staged an insurrection in the Algerian capital starting on January 24, 1960, and known in France as La semaine des barricades ("the week of barricades"). The ultras incorrectly believed that they would be supported by General Massu, the insurrection order was given by Colonel Jean Garde of the Fifth Bureau. As the army, police, and supporters stood by, civilian pieds-noirs threw up barricades in the streets and seized government buildings. General Maurice Challe, responsible for the army in Algeria, declared Algiers under siege, but forbade the troops to fire on the insurgents. Nevertheless, 20 rioters were killed during shooting on Boulevard Laferrière. Eight arrest warrants were issued in Paris against the initiators of the insurrection. Jean-Marie Le Pen, a member of parliament and future Front national founder, who called for the barricades to be extended to Paris, and theoretician Georges Sauge were then placed under custody.[58]

In Paris on January 29, 1960, de Gaulle called on his ineffective army to remain loyal and rallied popular support for his Algerian policy in a televised address:

I took, in the name of France, the following decision — the Algerians will have the free choice of their destiny. When, in one way or another – by ceasefire or by complete crushing of the rebels – we will have put an end to the fighting, when, after a prolonged period of appeasement, the population will have become conscious of the stakes and, thanks to us, realised the necessary progress in political, economic, social, educational, and other domains. Then it will be the Algerians who will tell us what they want to be.... Your French of Algeria, how can you listen to the liars and the conspirators who tell you that, if you grant free choice to the Algerians, France and de Gaulle want to abandon you, retreat from Algeria, and deliver you to the rebellion?.... I say to all of our soldiers: your mission comprises neither equivocation nor interpretation. You have to liquidate the rebellious forces, which want to oust France from Algeria and impose on this country its dictatorship of misery and sterility.... Finally, I address myself to France. Well, well, my dear and old country, here we face together, once again, a serious ordeal; in virtue of the mandate that the people have given me and of the national legitimacy, which I have incarned for 20 years, I ask everyone to support me whatever happens.[59]

Most of the Army heeded his call, and the siege of Algiers ended on February 1 with Lagaillarde surrendering to General Challe's command of the French Army in Algeria, the loss of many ultra leaders who were imprisoned or transferred to other areas did not deter the French Algeria militants. Sent to prison in Paris and then paroled, Lagaillarde fled to Spain. There, with another French army officer, Raoul Salan, who had entered clandestinely, and with Jean-Jacques Susini, he created the Organisation armée secrète (Secret Army Organization, OAS) on December 3, 1960, with the purpose of continuing the fight for French Algeria. Highly organized and well-armed, the OAS stepped up its terrorist activities, which were directed against both Algerians and pro-government French citizens, as the move toward negotiated settlement of the war and self-determination gained momentum. To the FLN rebellion against France were added civil wars between extremists in the two communities and between the ultras and the French government in Algeria.

The French army officers' uprising was due to a perceived second betrayal by the government, the first being Indochina (1947–1954); in some aspects the Dien Bien Phu garrison was sacrificed with no metropolitan support, order was given to commanding officer General de Castries to "let the affair die of its own, in serenity" ("laissez mourir l'affaire d'elle même en sérénité"[61]).

Role of women

Women participated in a variety of roles during the Algerian War, the majority of Muslim women who became active participants did so on the side of the National Liberation Front (FLN). The French included some women, both Muslim and French, in their war effort, but they were not as fully integrated, nor were they charged with the same breadth of tasks as the women on the Algerian side, the total number of women involved in the conflict, as determined by post-war veteran registration, is numbered at 11,000, but it is possible that this number was significantly higher due to underreporting.[63]

Urban and rural women's experiences in the revolution were much different. Urban women, who constituted about twenty percent of the overall force, had received some kind of education and usually chose to enter on the side of the FLN of their own accord.[64] Largely illiterate rural women, on the other hand, the remaining eighty percent, due to their geographic location in respect to the operations of FLN often became involved in the conflict as a result of proximity paired with force.[64]

Women operated in a number of different areas during the course of the rebellion. "Women participated actively as combatants, spies, fundraisers, as well as nurses, launderers, and cooks",[65] "women assisted the male fighting forces in areas like transportation, communication and administration"[66] the range of involvement by a woman could include both combatant and non-combatant roles. While most women's tasks were non-combatant, their less frequent, violent acts were more noticed, the reality was that "rural women in maquis rural areas support networks"[67] contained the overwhelming majority of those who participated; female combatants were in the minority.

End of the war

De Gaulle convoked the first referendum on the self-determination of Algeria on January 8, 1961, which 75% of the voters (both in France and Algeria) approved and de Gaulle's government began secret peace negotiations with the FLN. In the Algerian départements 69.51% voted in favor of self-determination.[68] The talks that began in March 1961 broke down when de Gaulle insisted on including the much smaller Mouvement national algérien (MNA), which the FLN objected to,[69] since the FLN was much the stronger movement with the MNA almost wiped out by this time, the French were finally forced to exclude the MNA from the talks after the FLN walked out for a time.[70]

The generals' putsch in April 1961, aimed at canceling the government's negotiations with the FLN, marked the turning point in the official attitude toward the Algerian war. Leading the coup attempt to depose de Gaulle were General Raoul Salan, General André Zeller, General Maurice Challe, and General Edmond Jouhaud.[70] Only the paratroop divisions and the Foreign Legion joined the coup while the Air Force, Navy and most of the Army stayed loyal to General de Gaulle, but at one moment de Gaulle went on French television to ask for public support with the normally lofty de Gaulle saying "Frenchmen, Frenchwoman help me!".[71]De Gaulle was now prepared to abandon the pieds-noirs, which no previous French government was willing to do. The army had been discredited by the putsch and kept a low profile politically throughout the rest of France's involvement with Algeria, the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) was to be the main standard bearer for the pieds-noirs for the rest of the war.

Talks with the FLN reopened at Évian in May 1961; after several false starts, the French government decreed that a ceasefire would take effect on March 18, 1962. A major difficulty at the talks was de Gaulle's decision to grant independence only to the coastal regions of Algeria, which the bulk of the population lived while hanging onto the Sahara, which happened to be rich in oil and gas while the FLN claimed all of Algeria,[71] during the talks, the pied-noir and Muslim communities engaged in a low level civil war with bombings, shootings, throat-cutting and assassinations being the preferred methods.[72] The Canadian historian John Cairns wrote at times it seemed like both communities were "going berserk" as everyday "murder was indiscriminate",[72] on 29 June 1961, de Gaulle announced on TV that fighting was "virtually finished" and afterwards there was no major fighting between the French Army and the FLN; during the summer of 1961 the OAS and the FLN engaged in a civil war, in which the greater number of the Muslims soon made a difference.[72] To pressure de Gaulle to abandon his demand to keep the Sahara, the FLN organized demonstrations in France from Algerians living there in the fall of 1961, which the French police crushed,[73] it was in the course of crushing one demonstration that a massacre of Algerians on 17 October 1961, which was ordered by Maurice Papon. On 10 January 1962, the FLN started a "general offensive" against the OAS, staging a series on the pied-noir communities as a way of applying pressure,[73] on 7 February 1962, the OAS attempted to assassinate the Culture Minister André Malraux by setting off a bomb to his apartment building that failed to kill its intended target, but did leave a four-year girl living in the adjoining apartment blinded by the shrapnel.[74] The blinding of the girl did much to turn French opinion against the OAS, on 20 February 1962 a peace accord was reached for granting independence to all of Algeria[75] In their final form, the Évian Accords allowed the pieds-noirs equal legal protection with Algerians over a three-year period, these rights included respect for property, participation in public affairs, and a full range of civil and cultural rights. At the end of that period, however, all Algerian residents would be obliged to become Algerian citizens or be classified as aliens with the attendant loss of rights, the agreement also allowed France to establish military bases in Algeria even after independence (including the nuclear test site of Regghane, the naval base of Mers-el-Kebir and the air base of Bou Sfer) and to have privileges vis-à-vis Algerian oil. The OAS started a campaign of spectacular terrorist attacks to sabotage the Évian Accords, hoping that if enough Muslims were killed, a general pogrom against the pieds-noirs would break out, which lead to the French Army turning its guns against the government,[75] despite ample provocation with OAS lobbying mortar shells into the casbash of Algiers, the FLN gave orders for no retaliatory attacks.[75] In the spring of 1962, the OAS turned to bank robbery to finance its war against both the FLN and the French state, and bombed special units sent by Paris to hunt them down.[76] Only eighty deputies voted against the Évian Accords in the National Assembly and Cairns wrote the "fulminations" of Jean-Marie Le Pen against de Gaulle were only "...the traditional verbal excesses of third-rate firebrands without a substantial following and without a constructive idea".[72]

Following the cease fire tensions developed between the Pied-noir community and their former protectors in the French Army. An O.A.S. ambush of French conscripts on 20 March was followed by 20,000 gendarmes and troops being ordered to occupy the major Pied-Noir district of Bab-el-Oued in Algiers.[77] A week later French-officered Muslim tirailleurs panicked and opened fire on a crowd of Pied-noir demonstrators in the centre of the city. Total casualties in these three incidents were 326 dead and wounded amongst the pieds-noirs and 110 French military personnel.[78] A journalist, Henry Tanner who saw the shootings on 26 March 1962 described the scene: "When the shooting stopped, the street was littered with bodies, of women, as well as men, dead, wounded or dying, the black pavement looked grey, as if bleached by fire. Crumpled French flags were lying in pools of blood. Shattered glass and spent carriages were everywhere".[79] A number of shocked pieds-noirs screamed that they were not French anymore.[80] One woman screamed "Stop firing! My God, we're French..." before she was shot down.[81] The massacre served to greatly embitter the pied-noir community and led to a massive surge of support for the OAS.[82]

In the second referendum on the independence of Algeria, held in April 1962, 91 percent of the French electorate approved the Evian Accords. On July 1, 1962, some 6 million of a total Algerian electorate of 6.5 million cast their ballots. The vote was nearly unanimous, with 5,992,115 votes for independence, 16,534 against, with most pieds-noirs and Harkis either having fled or abstaining.[83] De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country on July 3, the Provisional Executive, however, proclaimed July 5, the 132nd anniversary of the French entry into Algeria, as the day of national independence.

During the three months between the cease-fire and the French referendum on Algeria, the OAS unleashed a new campaign, the OAS sought to provoke a major breach in the ceasefire by the FLN but the attacks now were aimed also against the French army and police enforcing the accords as well as against Muslims. It was the most wanton carnage that Algeria had witnessed in eight years of savage warfare. OAS operatives set off an average of 120 bombs per day in March, with targets including hospitals and schools.

Summer 1962 saw a rush of pieds-noirs to France. Within a year, 1.4 million refugees, including almost the entire Jewish community, had joined the exodus to France. Despite the declaration of independence on July 5, 1962, the last French forces did not leave the naval base of Mers El Kébir until 1967. (The Evian Accords had permitted France to maintain its military presence for fifteen years—the withdrawal in 1967 was significantly ahead of schedule.)[84] Cairns writing from Paris in 1962 declared: "In some ways the last year has been the worse. Tension has never been higher. Disenchantment in France at least has never been greater, the mindless cruelty of it all has never been more absurd and savage. This last year, stretching from the hopeful spring of 1961 to the ceasefire of March 18, 1962 spanned a season of shadow boxing, false threats, capitulation and murderous hysteria. French Algeria died badly, its agony was marked by panic and brutality as ugly as the record of European imperialism could show. In the spring of 1962 the unhappy corpse of empire still shuddered and lashed out and stained itself in fratricide, the whole episode of its death, measured at least seven and half years, constituted perhaps the most pathetic and sordid event in the entire history of colonialism. It is hard to see how anybody of importance in the tangled web of the conflict came out looking well. Nobody won the conflict, nobody dominated it."[85]

The strategy of internationalisation of the Algerian War led by the FLN

At the beginning of the war, on the Algerian side, it was necessary to compensate the military weakness with political and diplomatic struggle, in order to win the war. Indeed, the balance of power was asymmetric between France and the FLN so at this time, victory seemed difficult to achieve.[86]

The Algerian revolution began with the insurrection of November 1, when the FLN organized a series of attacks against the French army and military infrastructure, and published a statement calling on Algerians to get involved in the revolution; in the short term however, it had a limited impact: the events remained largely unreported, especially by the French press (only two newspaper columns in Le Monde and one in l’Express), and the insurrection all but subsided. Nevertheless, François Mitterrand, the French Minister of the Interior, sent 600 soldiers to Algeria.

Furthermore, the FLN was weak militarily at the beginning of the war, it was created in 1954, so its numbers were not numerous. The FLN was linked the ALN which was also underdeveloped: it included only 3,000 men who were badly equipped and badly trained. Thus, they could not compete with the French army; in addition to that, there were conflicting divisions within the nationalist groups.

As a consequence, the members of the FLN decided to develop a strategy to internationalize the conflict: as they were militarily weaker than France, they'd have appeal politically, diplomatically and internationally. First, this political aspect would reinforce the legitimacy of the FLN in Algeria. Secondly, this strategy would be necessary all the more as Algeria had a special status compared to other colonised territories.[87] Indeed, Algeria was part of metropolitan France,[88] the French strategy consisted of keeping the conflict internal and strictly French in order not to deteriorate its image abroad. Thus, the FLN tried to give an international aspect to the conflict to get support from abroad, but also to put a diplomatic pressure on the French government, these objectives are in the statement of 1954.[87]

Thereby, the conflict rapidly became international thanks to the FLN which used the tensions due to the Cold War and the emergence of the Third World.

First of all, the FLN uses the tensions between the American and the Soviet blocs to serve its interests. Indeed, their objective was to be supported materially by the Eastern bloc so that the Western Bloc will react, and will ask for their independence because it is in the American interest that Algeria stays on the western side. Furthermore, the FLN used the tensions within each bloc, for instance, between France and the USA, the USA couldn’t openly tolerate colonisation. But France was their ally, and they couldn't renounce this alliance. Nevertheless, it gave them a bad image abroad, and could encourage Algeria to join the eastern side; in situation, the USA had every interest in pushing France to give Algeria its independence.[89]

Secondly, the FLN can count on the Third-Worldist support, after the Second World War, many new states were created as a result of decolonization. In 1945, there were 51 states in the UN, and in 1965, they are 117. Thus, the balance of power in the UN changed a lot, and the recently decolonised countries are now a majority, so they have huge capacities; in addition to that, those new states are part of the Third-Worldist movement. They went to be a third path in a bipolar world (it is the non-alignment), they are against colonisation, and for modernization.[90] Thus, they feel concerned by the Algerian conflict and support the FLN on the international stage, as an example, in 1954, a few days after the first insurrection, the radio in Yugoslavia (Third-Worldist) begin to make propaganda for the struggle of Algeria.[91] Furthermore, the FLN is invited in 1955 at the Bandung conference to represent Algeria, which is a huge international recognition.[92] Finally, Third-Worldist countries try to ensure that the Algerian conflict will be discussed at the UN general assembly,[93] as a result, the French government is more and more isolated.

After the Battle of Algiers (January 7, 1957 – October 9th, 1957) the FLN is weakened. Therefore, they are forced to accept more direct support from abroad, and especially the financial and military support from China, this help allows them to rebuild the ALN with 20 000 men.[93] Thus, the international dimension of the conflict is reinforced. Indeed, as there is a competition between the USSR and China, Khrushchev will show more moral support to Algeria, which will push the USA to react.[93] In addition to that, in 1958, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic is created. It means that Algeria has official representatives, so the negotiations with the French government are facilitated.[94] Nevertheless, it lasts three years, during which the climate is tense, but these negotiations will finally be more positive for the Algerian than for the French government. The PGAR is supported by the countries of the Third World, and by the communist bloc, on the contrary, France is isolated, and is under the pressure of the USA, so they are going to yield. Algeria finally becomes independent with the Evian agreements and largely thanks to the internationalisation of the conflict. And according to Matthew Connelly, this strategy has been used as a model by other revolutionary groups such as Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat, or the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela.[92]

Pieds-Noirs' and Harkis' exodus

Pieds-Noirs (including indigenous Mizrachi and Sephardi Jews) and Harkis accounted for 13% of the total population of Algeria in 1962. For the sake of clarity, each group's exodus is described separately here, although their fate shared many common elements.

Pieds-noirs

Pied-noir (literally "black foot") is a term used to name the European-descended population (mostly Catholic), who had resided in Algeria for generations; it is sometimes used to include the indigenous Sephardi Jewish population as well, which likewise emigrated after 1962. Europeans arrived in Algeria as immigrants from all over the western Mediterranean (particularly France, Spain, Italy and Malta), starting in 1830, the Jews arrived in several waves, some coming as early as 600 BC and during the Roman period, known as the Maghrebi Jews or Berber Jews. The Maghrebi Jewish population was outnumbered by the Sephardic Jews, driven out of Spain in 1492 and was further strengthened by Marrano refugees from the Spanish Inquisition through the 16th century. Algerian Jews largely embraced French citizenship after the décret Crémieux in 1871; in 1959, the pieds-noirs numbered 1,025,000 (85% of European Christian descent, and 15% were made up of the indigenous Algerian population of Maghrebi and SephardiJewish descent), and accounted for 10.4% of the total population of Algeria. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 of them fled, the first third prior to the referendum, in the largest relocation of population to Europe since the Second World War. A motto used in the FLN propaganda designating the pieds-noirs community was "Suitcase or coffin" ("La valise ou le cercueil") – an expropriation of a term first coined years earlier by pied-noir "ultras" when rallying the European community to their hardcore line.

The French government claimed not to have anticipated such a massive exodus; it estimated that a maximum of 250–300,000 might enter metropolitan France temporarily. Nothing was planned for their move to France, and many had to sleep in streets or abandoned farms on their arrival. A minority of departing pieds-noirs, including soldiers, destroyed their possessions before departure, to protest and as a desperate symbolic attempt to leave no trace of over a century of European presence, but the vast majority of their goods and houses were left intact and abandoned. Scenes of thousands of panicked people camping for weeks on the docks of Algerian harbors waiting for a space on a boat to France were common from April to August 1962. About 100,000 pieds-noirs chose to remain, but most of those gradually left in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily due to residual hostility against them, including machine-gunning of public places in Oran.[95]

Harkis

The so-called Harkis, from the Algerian-Arabic dialect word harki (soldier), were indigenous Muslim Algerians (as opposed to European-descended Catholics or indigenous Algerian MizrachiSephardiJews) who fought as auxiliaries on the French side. Some of these were veterans of the Free French Forces who participated in the liberation of France during World War II or in the Indochina War, the term also came to include civilian indigenous Algerians who supported a French Algeria. According to French government figures, there were 236,000 Algerian Muslims serving in the French Army in 1962 (four times more than in the FLN), either in regular units (Spahis and Tirailleurs) or as irregulars (harkis and moghaznis). Some estimates suggest that, with their families, the indigenous Muslim loyalists may have numbered as many as 1 million.[96][97]

In 1962, around 91,000 Harkis took refuge in France, despite French government policy against this. Pierre Messmer, Minister of the Armies, and Louis Joxe, Minister for Algerian Affairs, gave orders to this effect,[98] the Harkis were seen as traitors by many Algerians, and many of those who stayed behind suffered severe reprisals after independence. French historians estimate that somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 Harkis and members of their families were killed by the FLN or by lynch mobs in Algeria, often in atrocious circumstances or after torture,[99] the abandonment of the "Harkis" both in terms of non-recognition of those who died defending a French Algeria and the neglect of those who escaped to France, remains an issue that France has not fully resolved—although the government of Jacques Chirac made efforts to give recognition to the suffering of these former allies.[100]

Death toll

While it is difficult to enumerate the war's casualties, the FLN (National Liberation Front) estimated in 1964 that nearly eight years of revolution effected 1.5 million deaths from war-related causes. Some other French and Algerian sources later put the figure at approximately 960,000 dead, while French officials estimated it at 350,000. French military authorities listed their losses at nearly 25,600 dead (6,000 from non-combat-related causes) and 65,000 wounded. European-descended civilian casualties exceeded 10,000 (including 3,000 dead) in 42,000 recorded violent incidents. According to French official figures during the war, the army, security forces and militias killed 141,000 presumed rebel combatants,[101] but it is still unclear whether this includes some civilians.

More than 12,000 Algerians died in internal FLN purges during the war; in France, an additional 5,000 died in the "café wars" between the FLN and rival Algerian groups. French sources also estimated that 70,000 Muslim civilians were killed, or abducted and presumed killed, by the FLN.[101]

Martin Evans citing Gilert Meyinier imply at least 55,000 to up to 60,000 non-Harki Algerian civilians were killed during the conflict without specifying which side killed them.[16]

Historians, like Alistair Horne and Raymond Aron, state that the actual number of Algerian Muslim war dead was far greater than the original FLN and official French estimates, but was fewer than the 1 million deaths claimed by the Algerian government after independence. Horne estimated Algerian casualties during the span of eight years to be around 700,000. Uncounted thousands of Muslim civilians lost their lives in French Army ratissages, bombing raids, or vigilante reprisals, the war uprooted more than 2 million Algerians, who were forced to relocate in French camps or to flee into the Algerian hinterland, where many thousands died of starvation, disease, and exposure. In addition, large numbers of pro-French Muslims were murdered when the FLN settled accounts after independence,[102] with 30,000 to 150,000 killed in Algeria in post-war reprisals.[101]

Lasting effects in Algerian politics

After Algeria's independence was recognised, Ahmed Ben Bella quickly became more popular and thereby more powerful; in June 1962, he challenged the leadership of Premier Benyoucef Ben Khedda; this led to several disputes among his rivals in the FLN, which were quickly suppressed by Ben Bella's rapidly growing support, most notably within the armed forces. By September, Bella was in de facto control of Algeria and was elected premier in a one-sided election on September 20, and was recognised by the U.S. on September 29. Algeria was admitted as the 109th member of the United Nations on October 8, 1962. Afterward, Ben Bella declared that Algeria would follow a neutral course in world politics; within a week he met with U.S. PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, requesting more aid for Algeria with Fidel Castro and expressed approval of Castro's demands for the abandonment of Guantanamo Bay. Bella returned to Algeria and requested that France withdraw from its bases there; in November, his government banned political parties, providing that the FLN would be the only party allowed to function overtly. Shortly thereafter, in 1965, Bella was deposed and placed under house arrest (and later exiled) by Houari Boumédiènne, who served as president until his death in 1978. Algeria remained stable, though in a one-party state, until a violent civil war broke out in the 1990s.

For Algerians of many political factions, the legacy of their War of Independence was a legitimization or even sanctification of the unrestricted use of force in achieving a goal deemed to be justified. Once invoked against foreign colonialists, the same principle could also be turned with relative ease against fellow Algerians,[103] the FLN's struggle to overthrow colonial rule and the ruthlessness exhibited by both sides in that struggle were to be mirrored 30 years later by the passion, determination, and brutality of the conflict between the FLN government and the Islamist opposition. The American journalist Adam Shatz wrote that much of the same methods employed by the FLN against the French such as "the militarization of politics, the use of Islam as a rallying cry, the exaltation of jihad" to create an essentially secular state in 1962, were used by Islamic fundamentalists in their efforts to overthrow the FLN regime in the 1990s.[57]

Torture

French use of torture

Torture was a frequent process in use from the beginning of the colonization of Algeria, which started in 1830. Claude Bourdet had denounced these acts on December 6, 1951, in the magazine L'Observateur, rhetorically asking, "Is there a Gestapo in Algeria?" Torture was also used on both sides during the First Indochina War (1946–54).[104][94][105] D. Huf, in his seminal work on the subject, argued that the use of torture was one of the major factors in developing French opposition to the war.[106] Huf argued, "Such tactics sat uncomfortably with France's revolutionary history, and brought unbearable comparisons with Nazi Germany, the French national psyche would not tolerate any parallels between their experiences of occupation and their colonial mastery of Algeria." General Paul Aussaresses admitted in 2000 that systematic torture techniques were used during the war and justified it. He also recognized the assassination of lawyer Ali Boumendjel and the head of the FLN in Algiers, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, which had been disguised as suicides.[107] Bigeard, who called FLN activists "savages", claimed torture was a "necessary evil."[108][109] To the contrary, General Jacques Massu denounced it, following Aussaresses's revelations and, before his death, pronounced himself in favor of an official condemnation of the use of torture during the war.[110]

Bigeard's justification of torture has been criticized by Joseph Doré, archbishop of Strasbourg, Marc Lienhard, president of the Lutheran Church of Augsbourg Confession in Alsace-Lorraine, and others.[111]

In June 2000, Bigeard declared that he was based in Sidi Ferruch, a torture center where Algerians were murdered. Bigeard qualified Louisette Ighilahriz's revelations, published in the Le Monde newspaper on June 20, 2000, as "lies." An ALN activist, Louisette Ighilahriz had been tortured by General Massu.[112] However, since General Massu's revelations, Bigeard has admitted the use of torture, although he denies having personally used it, and has declared, "You are striking the heart of an 84-year-old man." Bigeard also recognized that Larbi Ben M'Hidi was assassinated and that his death was disguised as a suicide. Paul Teitgen, prefect of Algiers, also revealed that Bigeard's troops threw Algerians into the sea from helicopters, the corpses, found in open waters were nicknamed "crevettes de Bigeard" ("Bigeard's shrimps").[citation needed]

Algerian use of torture

Specializing in ambushes and night raids to avoid direct contact with superior French firepower, the internal forces targeted army patrols, military encampments, police posts, and colonial farms, mines, and factories, as well as transportation and communications facilities. Kidnapping was commonplace, as was the murder and mutilation of civilians,[48] at first, the FLN targeted only Muslim officials of the colonial regime; later, they coerced, maimed, or killed village elders, government employees, and even simple peasants who refused to support them. Throat slitting and decapitation were commonly used by the FLN as mechanisms of terror,[113] during the first two and a half years of the conflict, the guerrillas killed an estimated 6,352 Muslim and 1,035 non-Muslim civilians.[114][dubious– discuss]

Although the opening of the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after a 30-year lock-up enabled some new historical research on the war, including Jean-Charles Jauffret's book, La Guerre d'Algérie par les documents (The Algerian War According to the Documents), many remain inaccessible.[115] The recognition in 1999 by the National Assembly, permitted the Algerian War, at last, to enter the syllabi of French schools; in France, the war was known as "la guerre sans nom" ("the war without a name") while it was being fought as the government variously described the war as the "Algerian events", the "Algerian problem" and the "Algerian dispute"; the mission of the French Army was "ensuring security", "maintaining order" and "pacification", but was never described as fighting a war; while the FLN were referred to as "criminals", "bandits", "outlaws", "terrorists" and "fellagha" (a derogatory Arabic word meaning "road-cutters", but which was popularly mistranslated as "throat-cutters"-a reference to the FLN"s favorite method of execution, namely making people wear the "Algerian smile" by cutting their throats, pulling their tongues out and leaving them to bleed to death).[116] After reports of the widespread use of torture by French forces started to reach France in 1956–57, the war become commonly known as "la sale guerre" ("the dirty war"), a term that is still used today, and which reflects the very negative memory of the war in France.[117]

As the war was officially a "police action", for decades no monuments were built to honor the about 25, 000 French soldiers killed in the war while the Defense Ministry refused to classify veterans as veterans until the 1970s.[118] When a monument to the Unknown Soldier of the Algerian War was erected in 1977, the French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in his dedication speech refused to use the words war or Algeria, instead using the phrase "the unknown soldier of North Africa".[118] A national monument to the French war dead was not built until 1996, and even then spoke only of those killed fighting in "Afrique du nord" and was located in a decrepit area of Paris rarely visited by tourists, as if to hide the monument.[119] Further adding to the silence were the vested interests of French politicians. François Mitterrand, the Socialist president 1981–95 had been the Interior Minister 1954–55 and the Justice Minister 1955–57 during which time he had been deeply involved in the repression of the FLN, and it was only after Mitterrand's death in 1996 that Socialists started to become willing to talk about the war, and even then remain very guarded about Mitterrand's role.[120] Likewise, de Gaulle had promised in the Evian accords that the pieds-noirs could remain in Algeria, but after independence, the FLN had freely violated the accords, leading to the entire pied-noir population fleeing to France, usually with only their clothes they were wearing as they had lost everything they had in Algeria.[121] For Gaullists, this was not exactly a shining moment to cherish.[122]

In English, British and American historians tended to see the FLN as freedom fighters with the French being condemned as imperialists.[123] One of the first books about the war in English, A Scattering of Dust' by American journalist Herb Greer depicted the Algerian struggle for independence in a very sympathetic way.[124] Most work in English done in the 1960s and 1970s, which usually the work of left-wing scholars, focused on explaining how the FLN as a part of a generational change in Algerian nationalism and depicted the war as either a reaction to intolerable racist oppression and/or an attempt by peasantry impoverished by French policies to improve their lot.[125] One of the few military histories of the war was The Algerian Insurrection by a retired British Army officer Edgar O'Ballance who wrote with frank admiration for French tactics in Algeria, seeing the FLN as a terrorist group that needed to be suppressed and concluded that unfortunately the tactics that won the war militarily lost the war politically.[126]

In 1977, the British historian Alistair Horne published A Savage War of Peace, which is generally regarded as the leading book written on the subject in English, though written from a French perspective rather the Algerian,[127] after 15 years, Horne was not concerned about right or wrong, but with cause and effect.[127] A Francophile who lived in Paris at the time of the war, Horne had condemned the Suez war and the French bombing of the Tunisian village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef in 1958, arguing that the inflexibility of the FLN had won Algeria independence and created a sense of Algerian national identity, leading to rule by authoritarian, but “progressive” FLN regime,[127] the American journalist Adam Shatz wrote: “Not surprisingly, the best single survey of the war is by an English journalist, Alistair Horne, whose masterful A Savage War of Peace, published in 1977, still has no equal in French.”[57]

In a 1977 column published in The Times Literacy Supplement reviewing the book A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne, the Iraqi-born British historian Elie Kedourie vigorously attacked Horne as an apologist for terrorism, accusing him of engaging the "cosy pieties" of bien-pensants as Kedorie condemned those Western intellectuals who excused terrorism when committed by Third World revolutionaries.[127] Kedourie claimed that far from a mass movement, the FLN were a small gang of murderous intellectuals who used brutally terroristic tactics against the French and any Muslim who was loyal to the French, whom the French had beaten back by 1959. .[127] Kedourie charged that de Gaulle had cynically sacrificed the colons and the harkis as Kedourie charged that de Gaulle had chosen to disregard his constitutional oath as president to protect all the French to ensure that "the French withdrew and handed over power to the only organized body of armed men who were on the scene-a civilized government thus acting for all the world like the votary of some Mao or Ho, in the barbarous belief that legitimacy comes from the power of the gun".[128]

Before the war, Algeria was a favored setting for French films with the British French professor Leslie Hill writing: "In the late 1920s and 1930s, for instance, North Africa provided film-makers in France with a ready fund of familiar images of the exotics, mingling, for instance, the languid eroticism of Arabian nights with the infinite and hazy vistas of the Sahara to create a powerful confection of tragic heroism and passionate love",[129] during the war itself, French censors banned the entire subject of the war.[130] Since 1962 when film censorship relating to the war eased, French films dealing with the conflict have consistently portrayed the war as a set of conflicting memories and rival narratives (of which only some may be true, but which ones is left unclear) with most films dealing with the war taking a disjointed chronological structure where scenes before, during and after the war are juxtaposed out of sequence with one film critic referring to the cinematic Algeria as "an ambiguous world marked by the displacements and repetitions of dreams".[131] The consistent message of French films dealing with the war is that something horrible happened, but just what happened, who was involved, and why being left unexplained.[131] Though atrocities, especially torture by French forces are acknowledged, the French soldiers who fought in Algeria were and are always portrayed in French cinema as the "lost soldiers", tragic victims of the war who are more deserving of sympathy than the FLN people they tortured (almost invariably portrayed as vicious, psychopathic terrorists) – an approach to the war that has raised anger in Algeria.[132]

From time to time, the memory of the Algerian War surfaced in France; in 1987, when SS-HauptsturmführerKlaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon" was brought to trial for crimes against humanity, graffiti appeared on the walls of the banlieues (the slum districts in which most Algerian immigrants in France live in) reading: "Barbie in France! When will Massu be in Algeria!".[133] Barbie's lawyer Jacques Vergès adopted a tu quoque defense, asking the judges "is a crime against humanity is to be defined as only one of Nazis against the Jews or if it applies to more seriously crimes...the crimes of imperialists against people struggling for their independence?", going on to say there was nothing his client did against the French Resistance that was not done by "certain French officers in Algeria" whom Vergès noted could not be prosecuted because of de Gaulle's amnesty of 1962.[134] In 1997, when Maurice Papon, a career French civil servant was brought to trial for crimes against humanity for sending 1, 600 Jews from Bordeaux to be killed at Auschwitz in 1942, it emerged over the course of the trial that on 17 October 1961 Papon had organized a massacre of between 100 and 200 Algerians in downtown Paris, which was the first time that most of the French had heard of the massacre.[135] The revelation that hundreds of people had been killed by the Paris Sûreté was a great shock in France and led to uncomfortable questions being raised about what had happened during the Algerian War,[136] the American historian William Cohen wrote that the Papon trial "sharpened the focus" on the Algerian War, it not provide "clarity" as Papon's role as a civil servant under Vichy led to misleading conclusions in France that it was former collaborators who were responsible for the terror in Algeria, when in fact most of the men responsible like Guy Mollet, General Marcel Bigeard, Robert Lacoste, General Jacques Massu and Jacques Soustelle had all been résistants in World War Two, which was a fact that many French historians found very unpalatable.[137]

In 1992, the American John Ruedy published Modern Algeria: Origins and Development of a Nation.[138] Ruedy wrote under French rule, the traditional social structure had been so completely destroyed that when the FLN launched its independence struggle in 1954, the only way of asserting one’s interests was the law of the gun, which explains why the FLN was so violent not only in regards to its enemies, but also within the movement, forming the basis of an “alternative political culture” based on brute force that persists to this day.[139]

On 15 June 2000, Le Monde published an interview with Louisette Ighilahriz, a former FLN member who described in graphic detail her torture at the hands of the French Army and made the sensational claim that the war heroes General Jacques Massu and General Marcel Bigeard had personally been present when she being tortured for information.[140] What made the interview very touching for many French people was that Ighilahriz was not demanding vengeance, but rather wished to express thanks to Dr. François Richaud, the army doctor who extended her much kindness and whom she believed saved her life by treating her every time she was tortured, asking if it were possible for her to see Dr. Richaud one last time to thank him personally (Dr. Richaud it turned out had died in 1997),[141] as Ighilahriz had been an attractive woman in her youth, university-educated, secular, fluent in French and fond of quoting Victor Hugo, and her duties in the FLN had been as an information courier, she made for a most sympathetic victim as she was a woman did not come across as Algerian.[142] The American historian William Cohen commented had she been an uneducated man who had been involved in killings and was not coming forward to express thanks for a Frenchman, her story might not had resonated the same way,[143] the Ighiahriz case led to a public letter signed by 12 people who been involved in the war to President Chirac asking that October 31 be made a public day of remembrance for victims of torture in Algeria.[144] In response to the Ighilahriz case, General Paul Aussaresses gave an interview on 23 November 2000 in which he candidly admitted to ordering torture and extrajudicial executions, stating he had personally executed 24 fellagha, which he argued were justified as torture and extrajudicial executions were the only way to defeat the FLN.[145] In May 2001, General Aussaresses published his memoirs Services spéciaux Algérie 1955–1957, in which presented a detailed account of torture and extrajudicial killings in the name of the republic which he wrote were all done under orders from Paris, confirming what had been long suspected.[146] As a result of these interviews and Aussaresses's book, the Algerian War was finally extensively discussed by the French media who had ignored the subject as much as possible for decades, through no consensus emerged about how to best remember the war.[147] Adding to the interest was the decision by one war veteran Georges Fogel to come forward to confirm that he had seen Ighiahriz and many others tortured in 1957 while the politician and war veteran Jean Marie Faure decided in February 2001 to release extracts from the diary he kept at the time showing "acts of sadism and horror" he had witnessed,[148] the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet called this a moment of "catharsis" that was "explainable only in near-French terms: it is the return of the repressed".[149]

In 2002, Une Vie Debout: Mémoires Politiques by Mohammed Harbi, a former advisor to Ben Bella was published in which Harbi wrote: "Because they [the FLN leaders] weren't supported at the moment of their arrival on the scene by a real and dynamic popular movement, they took power of the movement by force and they maintained it by force. Convinced that they had to act with resolution in order to protect themselves against their enemies, they deliberately chose an authoritarian path."[57]

The Algerian War remains a contentious event today. According to historian Benjamin Stora, one of the leading historians on the Algerian war, memories concerning the war remain fragmented, with no common ground to speak of:

There is no such thing as a history of the Algerian War; there is just a multitude of histories and personal paths through it. Everyone involved considers that they lived through it in their own way, and any attempt to understand the Algerian War globally is immediately rejected by protagonists.[150]

Even though Stora has counted 3,000 publications in French on the Algerian war, there still is no work produced by French and Algerian authors cooperating with one another. Even though, according to Stora, there can "no longer be talk about a 'war without a name', a number of problems remain, especially the absence of sites in France to commemorate" the war. Furthermore, conflicts have arisen on an exact commemoration date to end the war, although many sources as well as the French state place it on March 19, 1962, the Evian agreements, others point out that the massacres of harkis and the kidnapping of pieds-noirs took place afterwards. Stora further points out, "The phase of memorial reconciliation between the two sides of the sea is still a long way off."[150] This was evidenced by the National Assembly's creation of the law on colonialism on 23 February 2005, which asserted that colonialism had overall been "positive."

Alongside a heated debate in France, the February 23, 2005, law had the effect of jeopardizing the treaty of friendship that President Jacques Chirac was supposed to sign with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika — a treaty no longer on the agenda. Following this controversial law, Bouteflika has talked about a cultural genocide, particularly referring to the 1945 Sétif massacre. Chirac finally had the law repealed through a complex institutional mechanism.

Another matter concerns the teaching of the war, as well as of colonialism and decolonization, in particular in French secondary schools[151] Hence, there is only one reference to racism in a French textbook, one published by Bréal publishers for terminales students (those passing their baccalauréat). Thus, many are not surprised that the first to speak about the October 17, 1961, massacre were music bands, including, but not only, hip-hop bands such as the famous Suprême NTM ("les Arabes dans la Seine") or politically engaged La Rumeur. Indeed, the Algerian War is not even the subject of a specific chapter in textbook for terminales[115] Henceforth, Benjamin Stora stated:

As Algerians do not appear in an "indigenous" condition, and their sub-citizens status, as the history of nationalist movement, is never evoked as their being one of great figures of the resistance, such as Messali Hadj and Ferhat Abbas, they neither emerge nor are being given attention. No one is explaining to students what colonization has been. We have prevented students from understanding why the decolonization took place.[115]

In metropolitan France in 1963, 43% of French Algerians lived in bidonvilles (shanty towns).[152] Thus, Azouz Begag, the delegate Minister for Equal Opportunities, wrote an autobiographic novel, Le Gone du Chaâba, about his experiences while living in a bidonville in the outskirts of Lyon. It is impossible to understand the third-generation of Algerian immigrants to France without recalling this bicultural experience. An official parliamentary report on the "prevention of criminality", commanded by then Interior Minister Villepin and made by member of parliament Jacques-Alain Bénisti, claimed that "Multilingualism (bilinguisme) was a factor of criminality." (sic[153]). Following outcries, the definitive version of the Bénisti report finally made multilingualism an asset rather than a fault.[154]

After having denied its use for 40 years, the French state has finally recognized its history of torture; although, there was never an official proclamation about it. General Paul Aussaresses was sentenced following his justification of the use of torture for "apology of war crimes." But, as it did during wartime, the French state claimed torture were isolated acts, instead of admitting its responsibility for the frequent use of torture to break the insurgents' morale and not, as Aussaresses has claimed, to "save lives" by gaining short-term information which would stop "terrorists".[155] The state now claims that torture was a regrettable aberration due to the context of the exceptionally savage war, but academic research has proven both theses false. "Torture in Algeria was engraved in the colonial act; it is a 'normal' illustration of an abnormal system", wrote Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, who discuss the phenomena of "human zoos."[156] From the enfumades (smoking parlors) of the Darha caves in 1844 by Pélissier to the 1945 riots in Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata, the repression in Algeria has used the same methods. Following the Sétif massacres, other riots against the European presence occurred in Guelma, Batna, Biskra, and Kherrata; they resulted in 103 deaths among the pieds-noirs. The suppression of these riots officially saw 1,500 other deaths, but N. Bancel, P. Blanchard and S. Lemaire estimate the number to be between 6,000 and 8,000.[157]

^"The French defeat in the war effectively signaled the end of the French Empire" Collective Memory: France and the Algerian War (1954–1962) Jo McCormack – 2010 [1]

Paul Allatson; Jo McCormack (2008). Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities. Rodopi. p. 117. ISBN90-420-2406-2. The Algerian War came to an end in 1962, and with it closed some 130 years of French colonial presence in Algeria (and North Africa). With this outcome, the French Empire, celebrated in pomp in Paris in the Exposition coloniale of 1931 and exalted in de Gaulle's description of “la France de Dunkerque à Tlemcen” [Greater France stretching from Dunkerque to Tlemcen], received its decisive death blow.

^France’s Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative. University of Wales Press. 15 October 2013. p. 111. ISBN978-1-78316-585-8. The difficult relationship which France has with the period of history dominated by the Algerian war has been well documented. The reluctance, which ended only in 1999, to acknowledge 'les évenements' as a war, the shame over the fate of the harki detachments, the amnesty covering many of the deeds committed during the war and the humiliation of a colonial defeat which marked the end of the French empire are just some of the reasons why France has preferred to look towards a Eurocentric future, rather than confront the painful aspects of its colonial past.

^Travis, Hannibal (2013). Genocide, Ethnonationalism, and the United Nations: Exploring the Causes of Mass Killing Since 1945. Routledge. p. 137.

^[2] Page 6 "The Algerian Ministry of War Veterans gives the figure of 152,863 FLN killed"

^[3] "The Algerian Ministry of War Veterans calculates 152,863 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) deaths(french sources), and although the death toll among Algerian civilians may never be accurately known estimate of 1500000 to 2000000 were killed Page 576

He also argues that the least controversial of all the numbers put forward by various groups are those concerning the French soldiers, where government numbers are largely accepted as sound. Most controversial are the numbers of civilians killed, on this subject, he turns to the work of Meynier, who, citing French army documents (not the official number) posits the range of 55,000 – 60,000 deaths. Meynier further argues that the best number to capture the harkis deaths is 30,000. If we add to this, the number of European civilians, which government figures posit as 2,788.-[

^Hussey, Andrew (27 January 2013). "Algiers: a city where France is the promised land – and still the enemy". The Guardian. Retrieved 2013-07-21. Meanwhile, Muslim villages were destroyed and whole populations forced to move to accommodate European farms and industry. As the pieds-noirs grew in number and status, the native Algerians, who had no nationality under French law, did not officially exist.

^On 19 March 1962 the responsible Minister of State Louis Joxe ordered attempts by French officers to transfer Harkis and their families to France to cease, followed by a statement that "the Auxiliary troops landing in the Metropolis in deviation from the general plan will be sent back to Algeria".

^Dine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 page 144.

^Dine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 page 145.

^ abCohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 225.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 226.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 232.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 232.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 232.

^Dine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 page 147.

^Dine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 pages 147–148.

^ abDine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 pages 149–156.

^Dine, Philip "A la recherche du soldat perdu: Myth, Metaphor and Memory in the French Cinema of the Algerian War" pages 142–158 from France At War In the Twentieth Century edited by Valerie Holman and Debra Kelly, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2000 pages 151–156.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 230.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 230.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 231.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 231.

^Cohen, William "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory" pages 219–239 from Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2002 page 231.

1.
Algerian Civil War
–
The Algerian Civil War was an armed conflict between the Algerian Government and various Islamic rebel groups which began in 1991 following a coup negating an Islamist electoral victory. By 1996-7 however it became clear that the violence and predation of the Islamists had lost its popular support, the war has been referred to as the dirty war’, and saw extreme violence and brutality used against civilians. Total fatalities have been estimated to be a range of different values from 44,000 to between 100,000 and 200,000, the elections were canceled after the first round and the military effectively took control of the government, forcing pro-reform president Chadli Bendjedid from office. After the FIS was banned and thousands of its members arrested, Islamist guerrillas rapidly emerged and began a campaign against the government. They formed themselves into armed groups, principally the Islamic Armed Movement, based primarily in the mountains. The GIA motto was no agreement, no truce, no dialogue, the MIA and various smaller insurgent bands regrouped, becoming the FIS-loyalist Islamic Salvation Army. After talks collapsed, elections were held and won by the armys candidate, the GIA not only fought the AIS but began a series of massacres targeting entire neighborhoods or villages — some evidence also suggests the involvement of government forces — which peaked in 1997. Its massacre policy caused desertion and splits, while the AIS, in the meantime 1997 parliamentary elections were won by a newly created pro-Army party supporting the president. In 1999, following the election of Abdelaziz Bouteflika as president, violence declined as large numbers of insurgents repented, the brotherhoods had been dismantled by the FLN government in retaliation for lack of support and their land had been confiscated and redistributed by the FLN government after independence. Rather than doing this, the worked to promote Islamic awakening as they were fellow travelers of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of Saudi Arabia. Al-Ghazali issuing a number of fatawa favorable to positions taken by local radical imams, after persecution by the security services in 1982 he founded the underground Mouvement Islamique Arme, a loose association of tiny groups, with himself as amir. His group carried out a series of attacks against the regime and was able to continue its fight for five years before Bouyali was killed in February 1987. Also in the 1980s, several hundred youth left Algeria for camps of Peshawar to fight jihad in Afghanistan, as Algeria was a close ally of the jihadists enemy the Soviet Union, these jihadists tended to consider the Afghan jihad a prelude to jihad against the Algerian FLN state. After the Marxist government in Afghanistan fell, many of the Salafist-Jihadis returned to Algeria and supported the Islamic Salvation Front, during and after the 1988 October Riots Islamists set about building bridges to the young urban poor. Evidence of their effectiveness was that the riots petered out after meetings between the President Chadli Bendjedid and Islamists Ali Benhadj and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The FLN government responded to the riots by amending the Algerian Constitution on 3 November 1988, a broad-based Islamist party, the Islamic Salvation Front was born shortly afterwards in Algiers on 18 February 1989, and came into legal existence in September 1989. The front was led by two men and his aim was to Islamise the regime without altering societys basic fabric. Ali Benhadj, a preacher and high school teacher appealed to a younger

2.
Cold War
–
The Cold War was a state of geopolitical tension after World War II between powers in the Eastern Bloc and powers in the Western Bloc. Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but a common timeframe is the period between 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine was announced, and 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed. The term cold is used there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the Soviet Union. The USSR was a Marxist–Leninist state ruled by its Communist Party and secret police, the Party controlled the press, the military, the economy and all organizations. In opposition stood the West, dominantly democratic and capitalist with a free press, a small neutral bloc arose with the Non-Aligned Movement, it sought good relations with both sides. The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, but they were armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Berlin Blockade was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the USSR and USA competed for influence in Latin America, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was stopped by the Soviets, the expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms of perestroika and glasnost. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully overthrew all of the communist regimes of Central, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The United States remained as the only superpower. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare

3.
Decolonisation of Africa
–
The Decolonisation of Africa followed World War II, when colonised people agitated for independence and colonial powers withdrew their administrators from Africa. During the Scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century, Western European powers divided Africa. By 1905, control of almost all African soil was claimed by Western European governments, Britain and France had the largest holdings, but Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal also had colonies. As a result of colonialism and imperialism, a majority of Africa lost sovereignty and control of resources such as gold. The introduction of imperial polices surfacing around local economies into cheap labor, exploitation of resources, following the concept of Rudyard Kiplings poem The White Mans Burden, some Europeans who benefited from colonisation felt that colonialism was needed to civilise Africans. On February 12,1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the result was the Atlantic Charter. It was not a treaty and was not submitted to the British Parliament or the Senate of the United States for ratification, one of the provisions, introduced by Roosevelt, was the autonomy of imperial colonies. After World War II, the US and the African colonies put pressure on Britain to abide by the terms of the Atlantic Charter, after the war, some British considered African colonies to be childish and immature, British colonisers introduced democratic government at local levels in the colonies. By the 1930s, the powers had cultivated, sometimes inadvertently. In some cases where the road to independence was fought, settled arrangements with the powers were also being placed. One of the leaders Nkrumah strived towards independence and pan Africanism, under British colonization and influence from indigenous elites Nkrumah endured innumerable amount of challenges towards full liberation. In 1947 the elites established United Gold Coast Convention with the influence of British government, through the UGCC, Nkrumah revealed his opposition towards the British by setting up newspapers, schools, and youth organizations in order to gain support from the community. After verbal and political attack from the UGCC, Nkrumah created his own movement known as the Convention Peoples Party, through his nonviolent movement and his legislative victory in 1951, the British soon realized that Nkrumah will continue to fight towards full decolonization. Through the issues of neocolonialism, the United States suggest for Ghana, in 1972, Nkrumah died of cancer and his plot towards Ghanas full independence withered away as well during his passing. This table is the arranged by the earliest date of independence in this graph,58 countries have seceded, the end of empire in French West Africa, Frances successful decolonization. Decolonization and African society, The labor question in French and British Africa, the Story of Nigeria Faber and Faber, London,1978 Dávila, Jerry. Hotel Tropico, Brazil and the challenge of African Decolonization, 1950–1980, ISBN 978-0822348559 Gordon, April A. and Donald L. Gordon, Lynne Riener. The Routledge companion to decolonization, comprehensive coverage, 365pp*Kevin Shillington History of Africa St. Martins Press, New York,1995 Khapoya

4.
Algeria
–
Algeria, officially the Peoples Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a sovereign state in North Africa on the Mediterranean coast. Its capital and most populous city is Algiers, located in the far north. With an area of 2,381,741 square kilometres, Algeria is the tenth-largest country in the world, the country is a semi-presidential republic consisting of 48 provinces and 1,541 communes. Abdelaziz Bouteflika has been President since 1999, Berbers are the indigenous inhabitants of Algeria. Algeria is a regional and middle power, the North African country supplies large amounts of natural gas to Europe, and energy exports are the backbone of the economy. According to OPEC Algeria has the 16th largest oil reserves in the world, Sonatrach, the national oil company, is the largest company in Africa. Algeria has one of the largest militaries in Africa and the largest defence budget on the continent, most of Algerias weapons are imported from Russia, with whom they are a close ally. Algeria is a member of the African Union, the Arab League, OPEC, the countrys name derives from the city of Algiers. The citys name in turn derives from the Arabic al-Jazāir, a form of the older Jazāir Banī Mazghanna. In the region of Ain Hanech, early remnants of hominid occupation in North Africa were found, neanderthal tool makers produced hand axes in the Levalloisian and Mousterian styles similar to those in the Levant. Algeria was the site of the highest state of development of Middle Paleolithic Flake tool techniques, tools of this era, starting about 30,000 BC, are called Aterian. The earliest blade industries in North Africa are called Iberomaurusian and this industry appears to have spread throughout the coastal regions of the Maghreb between 15,000 and 10,000 BC. Neolithic civilization developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean Maghreb perhaps as early as 11,000 BC or as late as between 6000 and 2000 BC and this life, richly depicted in the Tassili nAjjer paintings, predominated in Algeria until the classical period. The amalgam of peoples of North Africa coalesced eventually into a native population that came to be called Berbers. These settlements served as market towns as well as anchorages, as Carthaginian power grew, its impact on the indigenous population increased dramatically. Berber civilization was already at a stage in which agriculture, manufacturing, trade, by the early 4th century BC, Berbers formed the single largest element of the Carthaginian army. In the Revolt of the Mercenaries, Berber soldiers rebelled from 241 to 238 BC after being unpaid following the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War. They succeeded in obtaining control of much of Carthages North African territory, the Carthaginian state declined because of successive defeats by the Romans in the Punic Wars

5.
National Liberation Front (Algeria)
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The National Liberation Front is a socialist political party in Algeria. It was the principal nationalist movement during the Algerian War and the sole legal and it succeeded the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action, which had been formed earlier in the year. It initially had a five-man leadership consisting of Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Larbi Ben Mhidi, Rabah Bitat, Mohamed Boudiaf and they were joined by Krim Belkacem in August, and Hocine Aït Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella and Mohamed Khider later in the summer. On 1 November 1954 the FLN launched the Algerian War, Didouche was killed on 18 January 1955, whilst both Ben Boulaïd and Bitat were captured by the French. Abane Ramdane was recruited to take control of the FLNs Algiers campaign, the FLNs armed wing during the war was called the National Liberation Army. It was divided into guerrilla units fighting France and the MNA in Algeria, FLN is considered responsible for over 16,000 Algerian civilians killed and over 13,000 disappeared between 1954 and 1962. Notorious examples of FLN massacres include the Oran massacre of 1962, an estimated 4,300 people were also killed in France in FLN-related violence. The war for independence continued until March 1962, when the French government finally signed the Évian Accords, in July the same year, the Algerian people approved the cease-fire agreement with France in a referendum, supporting economic and social cooperation between the two countries as well. Full independence followed, and the FLN seized control of the country, Political opposition in the form of the MNA and communist organizations was outlawed, and Algeria was constituted as a one-party state. The FLN became its legal and ruling party. Immediately after independence, the party experienced an internal power struggle. In building his one-party regime, Ben Bella purged remaining dissidents, in 1965, tension between Boumédiène and Ben Bella culminated in a coup détat, after Ben Bella had tried to sack one of the Colonels closest collaborators, Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Boumédiène held tight control over party leadership until his death in 1978, at time the party reorganized again under the leadership of the militarys next candidate. The military remained well represented on the FLN Central Committee, and is held to have been the real power-broker in the country. During the 1980s the FLN toned down the socialist content of its programme, enacting some free-market reforms and it was not until 1988 that massive demonstrations and riots jolted the country towards major political reform. The riots led to the constitution being amended to allow a multi-party system, parliamentary elections the following year saw the ISF win a landslide victory, taking 188 of the 231 seats, whilst the FLN won only 15, finishing in third place behind the Socialist Forces Front. After internal power struggles and a change, it returned to supporting the presidency. However, it won a victory in the 2002 elections

6.
French colonial empire
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The French colonial empire constituted the overseas colonies, protectorates and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. The second empire came to an end after the loss of bitter wars in Vietnam and Algeria, competing with Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces, and later Britain, France began to establish colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India in the 17th century. A series of wars with Great Britain and other European major powers during the 18th century, France rebuilt a new empire mostly after 1850, concentrating chiefly in Africa, as well as Indochina and the South Pacific. Republicans, at first hostile to empire, only became supportive when Germany started to build her own colonial empire and it also provided manpower in the World Wars. It became a mission to lift the world up to French standards by bringing Christianity. In 1884 the leading proponent of colonialism, Jules Ferry declared, The higher races have a right over the lower races, full citizenship rights – assimilation – were offered, although in reality assimilation was always receding the colonial populations treated like subjects not citizens. At its apex, it was one of the largest empires in history, including metropolitan France, the total amount of land under French sovereignty reached 11,500,000 km2 in 1920, with a population of 110 million people in 1939. In World War II, Charles de Gaulle and the Free French used the colonies as bases from which they fought to liberate France. However, after 1945 anti-colonial movements began to challenge European authority, the French constitution of October 27,1946, established the French Union which endured until 1958. Newer remnants of the empire were integrated into France as overseas departments. These now total altogether 119,394 km², which amounts to only 1% of the pre-1939 French colonial empires area, by the 1970s, says Robert Aldrich, the last vestiges of empire held little interest for the French. He argues, Except for the decolonization of Algeria, however. During the 16th century, the French colonization of the Americas began, the story of Frances colonial empire truly began on 27 July 1605, with the foundation of Port Royal in the colony of Acadia in North America, in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada. A few years later, in 1608, Samuel De Champlain founded Quebec, which was to become the capital of the enormous, New France had a rather small population, which resulted from more emphasis being placed on the fur trade rather than agricultural settlements. Due to this emphasis, the French relied heavily on creating friendly contacts with the local First Nations community and these became the most enduring alliances between the French and the First Nation community. The French were, however, under pressure from religious orders to them to Catholicism. Through alliances with various Native American tribes, the French were able to exert a loose control over much of the North American continent, areas of French settlement were generally limited to the St. Lawrence River Valley. Prior to the establishment of the 1663 Sovereign Council, the territories of New France were developed as mercantile colonies

7.
French Fourth Republic
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The French Fourth Republic was the republican government of France between 1946 and 1958, governed by the fourth republican constitution. It was in ways a revival of the Third Republic, which was in place before World War II. France adopted the constitution of the Fourth Republic on 13 October 1946, the greatest accomplishments of the Fourth Republic were in social reform and economic development. In 1946, the government established a social security system that assured unemployment insurance, disability and old-age pensions. Moreover, the government proved unable to make decisions regarding decolonization of the numerous remaining French colonies. After a series of crises, most importantly the Algerian crisis of 1958, wartime leader Charles de Gaulle returned from retirement to preside over a transitional administration which was empowered to design a new French constitution. The Fourth Republic was dissolved by a referendum on 5 October 1958 which established the modern-day Fifth Republic with a strengthened presidency. After the liberation of France in 1944, the Vichy government was dissolved, Charles de Gaulle led the GPRF from 1944 to 1946. Meanwhile, negotiations took place over the new constitution, which was to be put to a referendum. De Gaulle advocated a system of government, and criticized the reinstatement of what he pejoratively called the parties system. He resigned in January 1946 and was replaced by Félix Gouin, the new constituent assembly included 166 MRP deputies,153 PCF deputies and 128 SFIO deputies, giving the tripartite alliance an absolute majority. Georges Bidault replaced Félix Gouin as the head of government, a new draft of the Constitution was written, which this time proposed the establishment of a bicameral form of government. Léon Blum headed the GPRF from 1946 to 1947, after a new legislative election in June 1946, the Christian democrat Georges Bidault assumed leadership of the Cabinet. This culminated in the establishment in the year of the Fourth Republic. The President of the Republic was given a symbolic role, although he remained chief of the French Army. The wartime damage was extensive and expectations of large reparations from defeated Germany largely failed, the United States helped revive the French economy with the Marshall Plan, 1948-1951, whereby it gave France $2.3 billion with no repayment. France was the second largest recipient after Britain, the total of all American grants and credits to France from 1946 to 1953, amounted to $4.9 billion. The terms of the Marshall Plan required a modernization of French industrial and managerial systems, free trade, after the expulsion of the Communists from the governing coalition, France joined the Cold War against Stalin, as expressed by becoming a founding member of NATO in April 1949

8.
French Fifth Republic
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Alsace-Lorraine would be restored at the end of World War I. Unlike other European countries France did not experience a population growth in the mid and late 19th century. From a population of around 39 million in 1880, France still had only a population of 40 million in 1945, the post-war years would bring a massive baby boom, and with immigration, France reached 50 million in 1968. This growth slowed down in 1974, since 1999, France has seen an unprecedented growth in population. In 2004, population growth was 0. 68%, almost reaching North American levels, France is now well ahead of all other European countries in population growth and in 2003, Frances natural population growth was responsible for almost all the natural growth in European population. Today, France, with a population of 62 and a million, or 65 million including overseas territories, is the third most populous country of Europe, behind Russia. Immigration in the 20th century differed significantly from that of the previous century, the 1920s saw great influxes from Italy and Poland, in the 1930-50s immigrants came from Spain and Portugal. Since the 1960s however, the greatest waves of immigrants have been from former French colonies, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. Much of this recent immigration was initially economical, but many of these immigrants have remained in France, gained citizenship, estimates vary, but of the 60 million people living in France today, close to 4 million claim foreign origin. Eastern-European and North-African Jewish immigration to France largely began in the mid to late 19th century, in 1872, there was an estimated 86,000 Jews living in France, and by 1945 this would increase to 300,000. Many Jews integrated into French society, although French nationalism led to anti-Semitism in many quarters, since the 1960s, France has experienced a great deal of Jewish immigration from the Mediterranean and North Africa, and the Jewish population in France is estimated at around 600,000 today. By far the largest of these is Paris, at 2.1 million inhabitants, followed by Lille, Lyon, much of this urbanization takes place not in the traditional center of the cities, but in the suburbs that surround them. With immigration from countries, these cités have been the center of racial. Compounding the loss of regionalism is the role of the French capital, the post-war years saw the state take control of a number of French industries. The modern political climate has however been for increasing regional power, many French intellectuals welcomed the war to avenge the humiliation of defeat and loss of territory to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. A pacifist, was assassinated at the start of the war, Prime Minister Rene Viviani called for unity—for a Union sacrée --Which was a wartime truce between the right and left factions that had been fighting bitterly. However, war-weariness was a factor by 1917, even reaching the army. The soldiers were reluctant to attack, Mutiny was a factor as soldiers said it was best to wait for the arrival of millions of Americans, the economy was hurt by the German invasion of major industrial areas in the northeast

9.
Algerian Communist Party
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The Algerian Communist Party was a communist party in Algeria. The PCA emerged in 1920 as an extension the French Communist Party and eventually became an entity in 1936. Its first congress was in Algiers in July 1936, where it was the PCA´s headquarter, in 1955 the party was banned by the French authorities. The party then oriented itself towards the liberation movement. PCA obtained legal status in 1962, and in the same year, the Algerian communists later regrouped as PAGS. The general secretaries of PCA were Benali Boukort from 1936 to 1939, Ouzegane during the central committee, Bouhali from 1947 to 1949. The PCA had at the beginning a lack of sensibility with the colonized aspirations. That is attributed to the majority of Pied Noirs between its members, from 12000 to 15000, the PCA supported the Blum-Viollette law and Setif´s repression of 1945. However, some Muslims were attracted to the PCA, some of them were, Ben Ali Boukurt, Ahmed Akkache and the general secretary Bachir Hadj Ali. The PCA additionally had trouble gaining traction since it had lost most of its proletariat base, a saying emerged that l’Algerie est une societe dont le proletariat est en France. Essentially, Algerias proletariat was in France, the First World war had another affect, it increased union membership, leading to a doubling of Algiers Trade Union membership. This only continued as the ranks of displaced workers flooded Algerias cities from the countryside, however, ties remained with the rural communities in which they had lived for generations. As these people joined the communist party, their networks allowed the party to expand into areas not typically considered its territory, yet the division that dominated Algerian Society also affected the supposedly egalitarian Communist Party, the division of ethnicity effected the Algerian communist party as well. Additionally, since the party was so tied to France, there were different ideas about how to pursue the the Cominterns call for peoples to free themselves around the world. A major part of the Algerian communist party believed that first a revolution must take place in France, leon Trotsky, as well as many other notable internationalists called this a continuation of the slave mentality. At the beginning of the Independence War, the PCA was damaged, the Muslim members wanted to join the nationalists, but not the Europeans. That ambiguity was due to the PCF´s equivocal positions, in 1956 the Central Committee of the PCA voted to join the Revolution maintaining its independent internal administration. During the War, some members of the PCA distinguished themselves, henri Maillot was killed while providing arms to the Nationalists and serving the Maquis Rouges

10.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks

11.
NATO
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party, three NATO members are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and are officially nuclear-weapon states. NATOs headquarters are located in Haren, Brussels, Belgium, while the headquarters of Allied Command Operations is near Mons. NATO is an Alliance that consists of 28 independent member countries across North America and Europe, an additional 22 countries participate in NATOs Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programmes. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the global total, Members defence spending is supposed to amount to 2% of GDP. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, politically, the organization sought better relations with former Warsaw Pact countries, several of which joined the alliance in 1999 and 2004. N. The Treaty of Brussels, signed on 17 March 1948 by Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, the treaty and the Soviet Berlin Blockade led to the creation of the Western European Unions Defence Organization in September 1948. However, participation of the United States was thought necessary both to counter the power of the USSR and to prevent the revival of nationalist militarism. He got a hearing, especially considering American anxiety over Italy. In 1948 European leaders met with U. S. defense, military and diplomatic officials at the Pentagon, marshalls orders, exploring a framework for a new and unprecedented association. Talks for a new military alliance resulted in the North Atlantic Treaty and it included the five Treaty of Brussels states plus the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated in 1949 that the goal was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in. Popular support for the Treaty was not unanimous, and some Icelanders participated in a pro-neutrality, the creation of NATO can be seen as the primary institutional consequence of a school of thought called Atlanticism which stressed the importance of trans-Atlantic cooperation. The members agreed that an attack against any one of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all. The treaty does not require members to respond with military action against an aggressor, although obliged to respond, they maintain the freedom to choose the method by which they do so. This differs from Article IV of the Treaty of Brussels, which states that the response will be military in nature. It is nonetheless assumed that NATO members will aid the attacked member militarily, the treaty was later clarified to include both the members territory and their vessels, forces or aircraft above the Tropic of Cancer, including some Overseas departments of France. The creation of NATO brought about some standardization of allied military terminology, procedures, and technology, the roughly 1300 Standardization Agreements codified many of the common practices that NATO has achieved

12.
Mourad Didouche
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Mourad Didouche is a veteran of the Algeria’s war of independence. Mourad Didouche, nicknamed si Abdelkader, was born on July 13,1927 at El Mouradia in Algiers in an originally from the village of Ibskriène. He did his primary and the school in El Mouradia then joined the technical High School of Algiers. In 1947, he organized the elections in his area. Arrested in a raid, he managed to escape from the court, since the creation in 1947 of the Special Organization, he was one of the founding and most active members. In 1952, with Ben Boulaïd he created the core of a movement in Algiers. During the crisis of 1953-54 and the opposition of the Central Committee of the PPA- MTLD to Messali El Hajj, upon his return to Algiers, he created with eight companions, the revolutionary comity of Unity and action. He also participated in the meeting of 22 held in June 1954, of this meeting emerged the first Revolutionary Council composed of six members Didouche Mourad, was appointed head of zone II. Yves Courrière nicknamed him the Saint - Just of the Algerian revolution 1 and he was one of the most prominent writers of the Declaration of 1 November 1954 and managed with the help of his assistant Zighoud Youcef to lay the groundwork for a political-military organization. In January 18,1955, when he was not yet 28 years old, Mourad Didouche died at the Battle of Douar Souadek and he was the first zone leader to fall. The Didouche Mourad county, formerly Bizot, is named in his tribute and it is located on the National 3 between Constantine and commume of Zighoud Youcef. In his tribute as well, a boulevard in central Algiers is named after him

13.
Larbi Ben M'hidi
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Larbi Ben Mhidi, commonly known as Si Larbi or simply as Ben Mhidi, was a prominent leader during the Algerian war of independence. He is one of the six founding members of the Front de Libération Nationale that launched an armed revolt throughout Algeria, Ben Mhidi initially commanded Wilaya V and played an important role at the FLNs Soummam conference in August 1956. He headed FLN operations during the Battle of Algiers where he was the last member of the FLNs Comité de Coordination et dExécution, Ben Mhidi was a strong believer in that the revolution should be directed by internal rather than external revolutionaries. He was captured by French paratroopers in February 1957 and his death was announced in March 1957 by Pierre Gorlin, Robert Lacostes press officer. The events surrounding his death were disputed, and contended by many that he was in fact tortured before being summarily executed. Many who knew him, have ruled out the possibility of him taking his own life, in 2000, General Aussaresses admitted that Ben Mhidi was executed whilst in his custody. The exact truth regarding Ben M’hidi’s death remains a mystery to this day, Ben Mhidi is considered to be a national hero in Algeria, and is considered to be a symbol of the revolution that brought an end to French colonialism. Larbi Ben Mhidi was born sometime in 1923 in the village of El Kouahi, Ain Mlila and he was the youngest of six children. The Ben Mhidi family later moved to Biskra, where Larbi Ben Mhidi began secondary school, in 1939, he joined the Algerian Muslim scouts, where he became a group leader within a very short period of time. Ben Mhidi became a follower of Messali Hadj and was a member of Hadjs Algerian Peoples Party during World War II, Ben Mhidi was arrested the following day after the Sétif uprising against the occupying French forces in May 1945. The uprising was suppressed through what is now known as the Sétif massacre and he was arrested in Biskra and imprisoned in the Coudiat prison in Constantine for four months. The massacres committed by the French army in Setif, Guelma, on March 15,1946, Ben MHidi was released from prison due to an amnesty being granted to the majority of nationalists imprisoned for the 1945 riots. The PPA was disbanded following the 1945 Sétif riots, and was replaced in October 1946 by the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, in 1950, Ben Mhidi had been convicted in absentia and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Ben Mhidi and eight members of this movement soon grew impatient with Hadj. During May and June 1954, they decided that Algeria would be split into five areas, Ben Mhidi was assigned Zone 5, Oran. On 10 October, Larbi Ben Mhidi and five members of the CRUA approved the transformation, thus giving birth to the National Liberation Front. The outbreak soon became known as Toussaint Rouge as it coincided with the Catholic festival and they later became known as The Men of November. Ben Mhidi was designated Wilaya V, however, he encountered difficulties as the area had been recently struck by and earthquake

14.
Capital punishment
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Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is a government sanctioned practice whereby a person is put to death by the state as a punishment for a crime. The sentence that someone be punished in such a manner is referred to as a death sentence, etymologically, the term capital in this context alluded to execution by beheading. Fifty-six countries retain capital punishment,103 countries have abolished it de jure for all crimes, six have abolished it for ordinary crimes. Capital punishment is a matter of controversy in various countries and states. In the European Union, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment, also, the Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, prohibits the use of the death penalty by its members. The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in 2007,2008,2010,2012 and 2014, non-binding resolutions calling for a moratorium on executions. Although most nations have abolished capital punishment, over 60% of the population live in countries where executions take place, such as China, India. Execution of criminals and political opponents has been used by nearly all societies—both to punish crime, in most countries that practise capital punishment it is reserved for murder, terrorism, war crimes, espionage, treason, defection or as part of military justice. In many countries use the death penalty, drug trafficking is also a capital offence. In China, human trafficking and serious cases of corruption are punished by the death penalty, in militaries around the world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offences such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny. The use of formal execution extends to the beginning of recorded history, most historical records and various primitive tribal practices indicate that the death penalty was a part of their justice system. Communal punishment for wrongdoing generally included compensation by the wrongdoer, corporal punishment, shunning, banishment, usually, compensation and shunning were enough as a form of justice. The response to crime committed by neighbouring tribes or communities included a formal apology, a blood feud or vendetta occurs when arbitration between families or tribes fails or an arbitration system is non-existent. This form of justice was common before the emergence of a system based on state or organized religion. It may result from crime, land disputes or a code of honour, acts of retaliation underscore the ability of the social collective to defend itself and demonstrate to enemies that injury to property, rights, or the person will not go unpunished. However, in practice, it is difficult to distinguish between a war of vendetta and one of conquest. Elaborations of tribal arbitration of feuds included peace settlements often done in a religious context, compensation was based on the principle of substitution which might include material compensation, exchange of brides or grooms, or payment of the blood debt. Settlement rules could allow for animal blood to replace human blood, the person offered for execution did not have to be an original perpetrator of the crime because the system was based on tribes, not individuals

15.
Ali La Pointe
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Ali lived a life of petty crime and was serving a two-year prison sentence when war broke out in Algeria in 1954. Recruited in the notorious Barberousse prison by FLN militants, he one of the FLNs most trusted. On 28 December 1956, he is suspected of killing the Mayor of Boufarik, in 1957 French paratroopers led by Colonel Yves Godard systematically isolated and eliminated the FLN leadership in Algiers. Godards counter-terrorism methods included interrogation with torture, in June, la Pointe led teams in setting explosives in street lights near public transportation stops and bombing a dance club that killed 17. Saadi Yacef ordered the leadership to hide in separate addresses within the Casbah, after Yacefs capture, la Pointe and three companions, Hassiba Ben Bouali, Mahmoud Hamid Bouhamidi and Petit Omar, held out in hiding until 8 October. In all,20 Algerians were killed in the blast and he was portrayed by Brahim Haggiag in the film The Battle of Algiers

16.
Ahmed Zabana
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Ahmed Zabana, born in 1926 in El Ksar, near Zahana about 32 km far from Oran, was an Algerian militant who participated in the outbreak of the Algerian War of liberation. He was executed by guillotine on June 19,1956 in Algiers, Ahmed Zabana National Museum It is named in the memory of Ahmed Zabana considered a national hero. Stade Ahmed Zabana is a stadium in Oran named after him. In 2012, the Algerian film director Saïd Ould-Khelifa launched a biographical film Zabana. with the role of Zabana played by Imad Benchenni. Commemoration of Ahmed Zabana - algerie-plus. com

17.
Saadi Yacef
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Saadi Yacef was one of the leaders of Algerias National Liberation Front during his countrys war of independence. He is currently a Senator in Algerias Council of the Nation, the son of illiterate parents from the Algerian region of Kabylie, he started his working life as an apprentice baker. From 1947 to 1949, Yacef served in the MTLDs paramilitary wing, after the OS was broken up, Yacef moved to France and lived there until 1952, when he returned to Algeria to work again as a baker. Yacef joined the FLN at the start of the Algerian War in 1954, by May 1956, he was the FLNs military chief of the Zone Autonome dAlger, making him one of the leaders on the Algerian side in the Battle of Algiers. He was captured by French troops on September 24,1957, Yacef has denied it, and historian Darius Rejali considers the accusation as highly suspect. He was ultimately pardoned by the French government after Charles de Gaulles 1958 return to power, Yacef claims to have written his memoirs of the battle in prison although he was illiterate. The writings were published in 1962 as Souvenirs de la Bataille dAlger, after the Algerian War, Yacef helped produce Gillo Pontecorvos film The Battle of Algiers, based on Souvenirs de la Bataille dAlger. Yacef played a character modeled on his own experiences in the battle

18.
Abane Ramdane
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Abane Ramdane was an Algerian political activist and revolutionary born in Kabylie. He played a key role in the organization of the struggle during the Algerian war. His influence was so great that he was known as the architect of the revolution and he was also the architect of the Soummam conference Bejaia in 1956 and was very close to Frantz Fanon. The National Liberation Front had him killed, supposedly for creating a cult of the rather than the collective leadership. A few years after independence, he was reburied in his village of Azouza in Tizi Ouzou Province

19.
Ferhat Abbas
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Ferhat Abbas was an Algerian politician who acted in a provisional capacity as the yet-to-become independent countrys President from 1958 to 1961. His political views evolved from pro-French collaboration to those of a revolutionary nationalist, the son of a caid, Said Ben Ahmed Abbas and Achoura Abbas, Ferhat Abbas was born in the village of Taher, French Algeria. In addition to being a caid in the village of Chahna, his father had also awarded the rosette. The young Abbas was educated first at Phillipeville, Constantine, where he received his baccalaureate, before finishing his education, he was required to serve in the French army medical corps where he reached the rank of sergeant. Abbas then attended the school at the University of Algiers. After graduating Abbas worked as a pharmacist at Setif, where became involved in politics, at Setif, he was elected to the municipal council, then to the general council of Constantine. During this period Abbas was pro-French in his outlook, as illustrated by such writings as an article dated 1936 titled I am France, however Abbas became disillusioned with France, during 1938, when his aspirations for equality showed no sign of being achieved. He accordingly organized the Algerian Popular Union and this organization promoted equal rights for both French and Algerians whilst maintaining Algerian culture and language as primary values. With the outbreak of World War II, Abbas volunteered to rejoin the corps of the French Army. His desire for continued and he turned to nationalism, issuing the Manifesto of the Algerian People on Feb.10,1943. The manifesto made apparent the philosophical changes that Abbas had undergone and he now condemned colonial rule by the French and demanded Algerian self-determination. Abbas argued the need for an Algerian constitution, which would grant equality to all Algerians, in May he, along with some colleagues, added a clause foreseeing a sovereign Algeria. The manifesto was published on June 26, but was rejected by the governor general and he, along with Messali Hadj form the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté, and called for an autonomous republic. This initiative resulted in Abbas being imprisoned for a year, in 1946 Abbas formed the nationalist political party Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien when he was elected member of the Constituent Assembly of France. This new organization called for a moderate approach, such as the formation of an Algerian state with the full cooperation of the French. 1946 also saw him named as editor of the publication Egalité and he remained active in politics as a member of the Algerian Assembly through 1955. During these years he was arrested twice by the French and his continuing efforts as a moderate nationalist did not succeed and he fled to Cairo, in 1956. While in Cairo, he worked alongside Ahmed Ben Bella, a fellow revolutionary, as he was opposed to violence, Ferhat kept himself distant from the Algerian War, and continued to try to act as an intermediary to the opposing sides

20.
Ahmed Ben Bella
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Ahmed Ben Bella was an Algerian socialist soldier and revolutionary who was the first President of Algeria from 1963 to 1965. Ahmed Ben Bella was born in Maghnia, in the department of Oran, western Algeria, on 25 December 1916. He was son of a farmer and small businessman, who supported his family through this economic activities and he had five brothers and two sisters. As it, he started complaining and chafed imperialism and colonialism and criticized French cultural influence, Ben Bella volunteered for service in the French Army in 1936. The Army was one of the few avenues of advancement for Algerians under colonial rule, posted to Marseille he played center mid-field for Olympique de Marseille in 1939–1940. His only appearance for the club was in a game against FC Antibes in the Coupe de France on 29 April 1940 in Cannes and he also scored a goal during the game. The club officials offered him a spot on the team. He also played for IRB Maghnia, Ben Bella conscripted to the army again in 1940, believing that this would give Algerians an equal treatment. Thereby, he fought for the French during World War II and he received the ″Croix de guerre″ after manning an anti-aircraft post during the german invasion in 1940. He was demobilised after the fall of France but joined a regiment of Moroccan tirailleurs with whom he saw throughout the Italian campaign. There, he was awarded because of his bravery demonstrated at Monte Cassino. For this, he was promoted to the rank of warrant officer, and he received the ″Médaille militaire″, on May 81945, while France was celebrating Germany’s capitulation, big protests started to occur in the Algerian town of Setif. Cruelties of colonialism became worse during the period, so Algerian people stood up against it. Thus, the protests turned to five days of rape and killing, the anti-colonialist however, put Algerian number of deaths around ten thousands. This shocked Ben Bella and his Algerian companions, as they realized that they start receiving an equal treatment even after their services in war. After the events of Setif, Ben Bella returned to Algeria, reincorporating into its political life, French authorities sent assailants with the intentions of assassinating him on his farm. The attempt to his life failed, but Ben Bella’s farm was confiscated, after the Government election of Marcel-Edmond Naegelen, he became part of a group that thought democratic independence was something illusory. Together with Messali Hadjs and his party, he founded the Organisation Spéciale and this was the immediate predecessor of the National Liberation Front

21.
Krim Belkacem
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Krim Belkacem was an Algerian revolutionary fighter and politician. Krim was born in the village of Aït Yahia Moussa in the Berber-speaking Kabylie region of Algeria, during the Second World War, he joined the French Army, and was promoted corporal in the First Algerian Sharpshooter Regiment, reputedly becoming an excellent shot. Demobilized on October 4,1945, he returned to his home village, Krim joined the underground Algerian Peoples Party at the beginning of 1946, setting up clandestine cells in 12 villages around Draa el-Mizan. Accused of the murder of a forest warden in 1947, he was hunted and he joined the maquis under the Pseudonym of Si Rabah with Moh Nachid, Mohand Talah and Messaoud Ben Arab. During the Algerian War of Independence, Krim was chief of the FLNs 3rd Wilaya, Kabylie, after his important role at the Soummam Congress—in which the FLN formalized its revolutionary program—Krim became one of the most important and powerful of all the FLN chiefs. Belkacem, who left Algeria after the Battle of Algiers, formed an alliance with Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, Belkacem was in opposition to the creation of the Political Bureau of the FLN in July 1962 by Ahmed Ben Bella, Colonel Houari Boumedienne, and Mohamed Khider. After the June 19,1965 takeover by the Political Bureau, he returned to opposition, accused of having organized an assassination attempt against Boumedienne, he was sentenced to death in absentia. He was found assassinated in 1970 in a room in Frankfurt. Belkacem was posthumously rehabilitated by the Algerian state by being buried in the Martyrs Square at the El Alia Cemetery on October 24,1984, Krim Belkacem Airport in Hassi Messaoud was named after him. Algerian war List of assassinated people

22.
Frantz Fanon
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In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of Independence from France, and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He wrote numerous books, including, most notably, The Wretched of the Earth and this focuses on the necessary role Fanon thinks violence must play in decolonization struggles. Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French département and his father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians and worked as a customs agent. His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of black Martinician and white Alsatian descent, Fanon was the youngest of four sons in a family of eight children, two of whom died in childhood. They could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, then the most prestigious school in Martinique. After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique, forced to remain on the island, French sailors took over the government from the Martiniquan people and established a collaborationist Vichy regime. In the face of economic distress and isolation under the blockade, they instituted a regime, Fanon described them as taking off their masks. Residents made many complaints of harassment and sexual misconduct by the sailors, the abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Fanon, reinforcing his feelings of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism. At the age of seventeen, Fanon fled the island as a dissident and he enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that reached Casablanca. He was later transferred to a base at Béjaïa on the Kabylie coast of Algeria. Fanon left Algeria from Oran and served in France, notably in the battles of Alsace, in 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de guerre. When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany along with photo journalists, Fanon and his fellow Afro-Caribbean soldiers were sent to Toulon. Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation, during the war, Fanon was exposed to severe European anti-black racism. For example, white women liberated by black soldiers often preferred to dance with fascist Italian prisoners, in 1945, Fanon returned to Martinique. He lasted a time there. He worked for the campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire. Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France, Fanon was educated in Lyon, where he also studied literature, drama and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Pontys lectures

23.
Rabah Bitat
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Rabah Bitat was an Algerian politician. Bitat served as President of the Peoples National Assembly from April 1977 to October 1990 and was the interim President of Algeria from 27 December 1978 to 9 February 1979 and he became president after the death of Houari Boumédiènne and was replaced by Chadli Bendjedid. He was from the Front de Libération National, Bitat first supported, then opposed, Ahmed Ben Bella. He held the portfolio under Houari Boumédienne before becoming the first president of the ANP. Bitat served as acting president after Boumédiennes death in December 1978, Bitat died in Paris on 10 April 2000. He is survived by his wife Zohra Drif, a member of the Council of the Nation

24.
Mohamed Boudiaf
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Mohamed Boudiaf, also called Si Tayeb el Watani, was an Algerian political leader and one of the founders of the revolutionary National Liberation Front that led the Algerian War of Independence. Mohamed Boudiaf was born in Ouled Madhi, French Algeria, to a family of former nobility and his education was cut short after primary school by poor health and his increasing activism in the nascent nationalist movement. A member of the nationalist Parti du Peuple Algérien of Messali Hadj, he joined the successor organization MTLD and its secret paramilitary wing. Boudiaf was responsible for organizing the OS network in the Sétif region, storing arms, collecting funds and he was sentenced in absentia to 10 years of prison by the French authorities, but avoided arrest. When Messali decided to dissolve the OS, his rivals combined with stalwarts of the strategy to form the CRUA. Boudiaf was among them, after falling out with Messali, whom he accused of authoritarian tendencies, the CRUA - PPA/MTLD rivalry quickly spiralled towards violence, and would continue during the anti-French revolution until the PPA/MTLD was destroyed. In July 1954, the CRUA-aligned Boudiaf survived an attempt by his former comrades-in-arms, wounded. The CRUA re-emerged as the Front de libération nationale, or FLN, Boudiaf was by this time a main leader of the movement, and emerged as an important member of the exiled leadership working from Cairo and Algerias neighbouring countries. In 1956, he was captured along with Ahmed Ben Bella and several other FLN leaders in an aircraft hijacking by French forces. While prisoner, he was elected minister in the FLNs government-in-exile, the GPRA, at its creation in 1958. He was not released immediately before the independence of Algeria in 1962. On independence, internal conflict racked the FLN, which split into rival factions as French forces withdrew, houari Boumédiène of the Armée de Libération Nationale and Ahmed Ben Bella, of the exiled leadership, brought down their rivals and set up a single-party state under Ben Bellas presidency. The increasingly marginalized Boudiaf protested these developments, and founded an opposition party, the PRS. Boudiaf was forced into exile, and settled in neighbouring Morocco, after Colonel Boumédiènes coup détat in 1965, Boudiaf remained in opposition, as he did under his successor, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid. He quickly accepted, and was signed into the post. Even as head of state, Boudiaf was completely dependent on the forces that had him to power. In addition, the continued to drift towards civil war, with increasing Islamist violence in the regions surrounding Algiers. The political scene remained chaotic, the economy was fraying, the murder caused intense shock in Algeria, and remains a moment of iconic importance in the countrys modern history

25.
Ali Kafi
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Ali Hussain Kafi was an Algerian politician. He was Chairman of the High Council of State and as acting President from 1992 to 1994, Kafi was born in El Harrouch in 1928. Kafi was one of the figures of the Algerian underground forces that fought for independence from France from 1954 to 1962. At that time he was promoted to the rank of colonel, Kafi was the Algerian ambassador to several countries, including Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Italy. He served as the chairman of the High Council of State of Algeria from 2 July 1992 to 31 January 1994 and he was selected as chairman after the assassination of Muhammad Boudiaf. The Council of State was intended as a transitional government, in 1992, he promised a referendum that eventually never took place. Kafi died at the age of 84 on 16 April 2013 in Geneva and his body was buried at El-Alia cemetery

26.
Benyoucef Benkhedda
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Benyoucef Benkhedda was an Algerian politician. He headed the third GPRA exile government of the National Liberation Front, at the end of the war, he was briefly the de jure leader of the country, however he was quickly sidelined by more conservative figures. Benyoucef Benkhedda was born in 1920 in Berrouaghia, Médéa Province, the son of a Qadi, he attended both the local Madrasah and French colonial school. He later attended the Ibn Rochd lycée at Blida where he met pioneering Algerian nationalists such as Mohamed Lamine Debaghine, Saad Dahlab, Abane Ramdane, Ali Boumendjel and you are the knives which we sharpen against France. Was the oft repeated cry of the college headmaster, having received his baccalauréat, he entered the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Algiers in 1943, and after an interruption of his studies, obtained his degree in pharmacy in 1953. In 1942 he joined the Algerian Peoples Party, a year later he was arrested and detained by local SDECE agents for campaigning against conscription of Algerians in the war against Germany as part of the unsubmissives of Blida. He was released eight months later and he was a member of the central committee of the PPA-MTLD in 1947 and served as the general secretary between 1951-1954. In November 1954 he was arrested again and released in May 1955, due to the intervention of French liberals and he became an adviser to Abane Ramdane in Algiers. He, Abane and Ben Mhidi comprised the political and military triumvirate which directed the revolutionary Autonomous Zone, Algiers had become the capital of the resistance. On August 9,1961 he was appointed the president of the government and completed negotiations with France. A cease-fire was proclaimed the day before France officially recognised the national integrity of Algeria and he was welcomed as the countrys leader by a jubilant Algerian population on July 3,1962, the day that independence was recognised officially by France. A crisis emerged later that year between the government and Ahmed Ben Bella, supported by the Frontier Army and Ben Khedda was forced to stand down to avoid a fratricidal bloodbath. In 1976 he, with three leaders of the war of liberation signed a proclamation which set about to create a national assembly. The four signatories were placed under house arrest and had their property seized, under the government of Chadli Bendjedid which claimed to be a multi-party system, he created El Oumma with Abderahmane Kiouane and other friends from the liberation war in 1989. Its objective was the implemation of the Declaration of the 1st of November,1954, the aim of El Oumma was to work towards a coming together of the Islamist and Nationalist parties for an Islamic society. The president, Liamine Zeroual, who had succeeded Chadli promulgated a law prohibiting the use of the world Islam by the parties under penalty of dissolution, El Oumma dissolved, unsuccessful, in 1997. At the same time he founded the Tadhamoune with Sheikh Ahmed Sahnoune with the aim of denouncing the state because of human rights violations after the military coup of January 1992. He lived a life for the rest of his days, running a pharmacy in Hydra

27.
Mohammed Seddik Benyahia
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Mohammed Seddik Benyahia or Ben Yahia was an Algerian politician and a militant nationalist during the war in Algeria. After independence he was Minister of Information, Higher Education, Finance and he was born on January 30,1932 in Jijel. During the Algerian war, he took a part in the struggle for independence of his country. He was responsible for chairing the meeting of CNRA in Tripoli in 1962, after the independence of his country, he held the post of ambassador to Moscow and London. Minister of Information from 1967 to 1971, When he organized the first Pan-African Festival in 1968, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research from 1971 to 1977. Minister of Finance from 1977 to 1979, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1979 till his death. On 3 May 1982, his plane was shot down on the Iran-Turkey border during his mission in Iran–Iraq War. Both Iran and Iraq rejected responsibility, Algerian newspaper El Watan May 26,201230 years ago, The Tragic death of Seddik Benyahia and his companions

28.
Raoul Salan
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Raoul Albin Louis Salan was a French Army general. He served as the fourth French commanding general during the First Indochina War and he was one of four generals who organized the 1961 Algiers Putsch operation. He was the founder of the Organisation armée secrète and he was the most decorated soldier in the French Army. Salan was born on 10 June 1899 in Roquecourbe, Tarn and he graduated from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. He served in the French Army during World War I, Salan served as the commander of French forces in Vietnam from 1945 to 1947. By 1948, he was commander of all French land forces in East Asia, after the death of Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in 1952, Salan served as commander-in-chief of French forces in French Algeria in 1956. In 1958, Salan called for the return to power of Charles De Gaulle and he retired shortly after, first moving to Spain, then to mainland France. He was banned from entering Algeria in 1960, nevertheless, Salan returned to Algeria to organize the putsch on 21 April 1961 with André Zeller, Edmond Jouhaud and Maurice Challe. After the failure of the putsch, he became the chief of Organisation armée secrète and he was arrested in April 1962. Salan was charged with treason and condemned in absentia to death, then, in April 1962, he was arrested in Algiers. The death sentence on him was commuted to life imprisonment, Salan was the most decorated soldier in the French Army. Salan died on 3 July 1984, every year, former members of the OAS bring flowers to his tomb on his death anniversary. France and the Algerian War, 1954-1962, Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy General Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, association of Friends of Raoul Salan Raoul Salan, a colonial General by Madeleine Rebérioux BBC article on Salans 1962 sentencing

29.
Paul Aussaresses
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Paul Aussaresses was a French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War. His actions during the Algerian War, and later defense of those actions, Aussaresses was a career Army intelligence officer with an excellent military record when he joined the Free French Forces in North Africa during the Second World War. Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000 when, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, in the aftermath of the controversy, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his army uniform and his Légion dHonneur. Aussaresses remained defiant and dismissed the latter act as hypocritical, Aussaresses, recognizable by his eye patch, lost his left eye due to a botched cataract operation. Aussaresses was born on 7 November 1918, just four days before the end of World War I, in Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, Tarn department and his father, Paul Aussaresses senior, was serving in the French military at the time of his sons birth because of the war. In 1941, Aussaresses served a year as a cadet in Cherchell. The next year, in 1942, he volunteered for the special unit in France. He a member of a Jedburgh team and member of Team CHRYSLER which parachuted into France behind the German lines in August 1944, the Jedburghs worked clandestinely behind enemy lines to harness the local resistance and coordinate their activities with the wishes of the Allied Commanders. CHRYSLER deployed from Algeria via an American aircraft to work with the local French Resistance in Ariège, on 1 September 1946 he joined the 11th Choc Battalion and commanded the battalion from 1947 until 1948, when he was replaced by Yves Godard. Later, he served in the First Indochina War with the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment, in 1955 he was transferred to Philippeville, Algeria to be part of the 41st Parachute Demi-Brigade as an intelligence officer. He restarted his demi-brigades intelligence unit, which had disbanded during peacetime but was deemed necessary by the French Army who wanted to quell the insurgency of the Algerian rebels. On 20 August 1955 the FLN staged an attack against the police of Philippeville, Aussaresses states that he had information about this attack well beforehand and therefore he was able to prevent much of the possible bloodshed. The members of the FLN had also forced many of the men, women and children of the countryside to march in front of them, without weapons, Aussaresses reports that his battalion killed 134 of these men, women and children, and that hundreds more had been wounded. He reports that two men from his own side also died, and that one hundred others had been wounded. In the spring of 1956, he attended a training camp in Salisbury. He returned to Bône, Algeria in May 1956 to continue exercises with paratroopers on their way to the Suez Canal, on 1 June 1956 he received a spinal fracture from a parachuting exercise, which prevented him from participating in the Suez operation. General Jacques Massu, who had noted Aussaresses work against the insurrections in Philippeville, Aussaresses reported for duty in Algiers on 8 January 1957. He was the executioner and intelligence collector under Jacques Massu during the Battle of Algiers